THE  ROBERT  E.  COWAN  COLLECTION 

I'RKSKNTKI)    TO    THK 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

BY 

C.  P.  HUNTINGTON 

JUNE,  '.897. 


Recession  No, 


. 


, 


A  TRAITOR  GOVERNMENT 


BY 


JUDAS  REPRESENTATIVES. 


Representative  Legislation  a  Fraud  and  Delusion, 
Direct  Legislation  the  Right  and  Only  Solution. 


We  Demand  Justice  !     Where  is  She  ?" 


BY     J.     H.     KONES, 

OAKLAND,  CAL.  X^DBRA^7I 

'    OF  T»» 

XJNIVERSITY 

COPYRIGHT   APPLIED    FOR.  ^V 


PRICE,  IS  CENTS. 


[ 


A  TRAITOR  GOVERNMENT 


BY 


JUDAS  REPRESENTATIVES, 


Representative  Legislation  a  Fraud  and  Delusion- 
Direct  Legislation  tlie  Right  and  Only  Solution* 


BY    J.    H.    KONES, 

OAKLAND,  CAI<. 


COPYRIGHT   APPIvIIiD   FOR. 


PRICE,  15  CENTS. 


LJ& 


A  TRAITOR  GOVERNMENT  BY  JUDAS  REPRESENTATIVES, 


The  gray  dawn  of  the  twentieth 
century  is  fast  approaching,  and 
we  shall  herald  it  with  the  sweet 
chime  of  liberty  bells,  which  will 
proclaim  to  the  world  the  breaking 
asunder  of  fetters  that  will  no  more 
enslave  us;  the  overthrow  for  all 
time  of  our  enemies;  the  proclama- 
tion of  a  new  birth  and  of  a  gov- 
ernment that  will  bind  with  cords 
of  love  into  one  brotherhood  all 
mankind.  Either  this  shall  be  our 
happy  condition,  or,  hopelessly  en- 
slaved, we  shall  be  the  prey  of  our 
enemies,  when  darkness  shall  sur- 
round us  never  to  disappear. 

Our  boast  of  great  achievements 
in  literature,  art,  science,  inven- 
tions and  discoveries  innumerable, 
shall  avail  us  naught  if  only  upon 
a  few  they  shower  their  special 
blessings,  while  to  the  mass  of  toil- 
ing and  untoiling  millions  no  bur- 
den is  uplifted,  but,  weary  with 
life,  they  perish  within  sight  of 
plenty. 

Our  government  is  repeating  the 
old  story  of  the  nations  of  the  past, 
disintegration  has  'set  in,  and  we 
are  going  into  rapid  decay.  Each 
day  reveals  more  of  its  incapacity 
and  inability  to  cope  with  the  vexed 
problems  that  confront  it.  Every 
act  done  by  the  ruling  powers  is, 


not  to  solve  the  problem  of  govern- 
ment and  apply  a  remedy,  but  to 
stave  off  and  avert  the  day  of  im- 
pending judgment.  Wealth  and 
class  rule,  rapid  advancement  in 
education  and  art,  go  along  with 
immorality  and  vice.  The  oppres- 
sor and  the  oppressed — a  divided 
house — murmurings  ^of  discontent, 
hatred  and  revolution. 

Under  the  existing  order  of 
things  a  revolution  is  inevitable, 
and  it  must  come  either  by  the 
ballot  or  by  the  bullet.  It  is  our 
last  ditch.  If  successful,  the  solu- 
tion of  the  vexed  problem  of  gov- 
ernment is  near  at  hand;  but  if  we 
fail,  the  world  will  fail  with  us, 
and  the  future  of  the  human  race 
will  be  master  and  slave.  China, 
Egypt  and  other  nations  show  a 
critical  period  in  their  histories, — 
the  people  bowing  down  before 
their  masters  ;  they  are,  and  ever 
will  continue  to  be,  a  race  of  mas- 
ters and  slaves. 

With  all  of  our  art,  literature, 
science,  education  and  religious 
teachings,  we  are  apparently  as  far 
from  the  solution  of  the  problem 
of  government  as  at  the  time  of 
Christ,  and  the  churches  to-day  are 
not  beyond  the  Jewish  Church  of 
his  time. 


—  4  — 


No  one  of  any  intelligence  can 
review  our  government  who  will 
not  be  greatly  impressed  with  dis- 
may at  the  awful  mess  that  has 
been  made  of  it  all,  from  the  chief 
executive  down  to  the  petty  officer 
of  the  village.  Of  the  hundreds  of 
cities  in  the  nation,  not  one  can  be 
found  which  would  be  a  fit  pattern 
for  reproduction.  A  statesman  is 
something  unheard  of  to-day,  either 
in  the  Republican  or  Democratic 
ranks,  and,  with  scarcely  an  excep- 
tion, they  are*  either  professional 
politicians  or  boodlers,  the  latter 
constituting  the  great  majority. 

It  nauseates  one  to  think  of 
comparing  such  men  as  Cleveland, 
Harrison,  Carlisle,  Sherman,  Hill, 
Matt  Quay,  Voorhees,  Clarkson, 
Dudly  and  his  blocks  of  five, 
— Wannamaker,  Depew,  Mike  De 
Young,  Boss  Buckley  and  Croker — 
and  a  host  of  boodlers  and  hench- 
men who  might  be  mentioned,  with 
such  men  as  Washington,  Hamil- 
ton, Jefferson,  Jackson,  Clay,  Web- 
ster, Sumner,  Stanton,  Wilson  and 
Lincoln.  Men  to-day,  as  at  other 
times,  are  filled  with  their  own 
conceits  and  bitter  prejudices;  the 
windows  of  their  minds  are  covered 
with  cobwebs  and  dimmed  with 
dust.  Fact,  reason,  observation  or 
experience  have  little  or  no  effect 
in  determining  their  political  acts. 
Deception  practiced  upon  them  by 
political  parties  has  always  been 


successful.  Poor  blind  fools  !  they 
are  the  easy  prey  of  every  schem- 
ing politician  who,  by  smooth  false 
speech,  hypocrisy  and  treachery, 
gives  them  over  into  the  hands  of 
their  enemy,  who  strips  them  of 
their  property  and  drives  them  out 
to  starve  or  become  vagabonds  or 
criminals.  Poor  dupes  and  confi- 
ding idiots!  Writhing  and  bleeding 
under  tortures  of  the  lash,  they 
still  cling  to  their  betrayer,  and 
curse  the  man  who  would  expose 
his  treachery. 

Take  the  laboring  men,  farmers 
and  mechanics,  who  are  the  three 
producing  classes,  and  who  cast 
nine  out  of  every  ten  votes  that  are 
cast,  and  compare  their  condition 
with  that  of  those  who  do  not  pro- 
duce, and  note  the  difference  ! 

Then  take  the  laws  of  the  land 
to  discover  in  whose  interest  they 
are  framed,  and  you  will  immedi- 
ately find  what  and  who  make  such 
differences. 

To  these  three  classes  the  politi- 
cian directs  his  attention  to  secure 
votes,  which  he  gets;  and,  when 
asked  his  candid  opinion  of  voters, 
he  will  tell  you  plainly  that  they 
are  a  pack  of  "damn  fools." 

Now  look  at  your  condition,  and 
no  one  but  such  a  fool  will  say  the 
politician  is  right. 

I  say  it  plainly,  that  for  either 
the  Democratic  or  Republican  party 
to  come  before  the  American  people 


UNIVERSITY 


for  their  votes,  after  the  past  low, 
slum  record,  is  a  gross  insult  to  the 
intelligence  of  the  people,  and  the 
record  I  shall  present  and  defy 
them  to  disprove. 

Those  two  old  political  parties 
play  the  same  old  bunco  skin  game 
year  after  year.  Their  political 
bunco-steerers  appear  just  before 
election,  bubbling  over  with  love 
for  the  workingman,  and  find  the 
voters  of  the  country  such  drivel- 
ing, idiotic  suckers,  that  they  can 
"run  them  in"  times  without 
number,  with  the  same  bald-headed 
chestnut — ' '  tariff. ' '  After  election, 
they  immediately  kick  them  out 
and  have  no  further  use  for  them 
until  the  next  election,  when  the 
same  old  rot  is  rehashed  and  given 
them  with  like  results.  The  sense- 
less cry  of  these  two  old  parties  for 
the  last  twenty-two  years  has  been 
either  ' 'tariff1'  or  "tariff  reform," 
as  a  panacea  for  hard  times. 

In  their  loud-mouthed  harangues 
and  sawings  of  the  air,  they  lash 
themselves  into  a  foaming  sea  of 
rage  against  each  other,  each  con- 
tending for  a  different  view  of  the 
question,  while  in  fact  there  has 
never  existed  a  difference  of  over 
five  per  cent,  between  them  on  the 
subject.  The  tariff  on  imports  does 
not  exceed  over  two  hundred  mil- 
lions per  annum,  making  a  dif- 
ference only  of  ten  millions  per 
annum.  No  wonder  those  white- 


livered  cowards  howl  upon  the  tar- 
iff question.  At  every  election 
time  they  appear  upon  the  scene 
with  their  wild  jackass  bray,  while 
each  year  the  country  becomes 
more  poverty-stricken,  desolation 
steals  through  the  land  and  mul- 
titudes starve. 

Parasites  like  the  bond-holder, 
banker  and  money-shark,  too  lazy 
to  work  or  to  aid  in  production, 
are  always  assisted,  and  prey  upon 
the  products  of  others.  Through 
the  enactment  of  infamous  and 
murderous  laws  framed  for  their 
special  benefit,  they  "stand  us  up" 
in  broad  daylight  and  strip  us  of 
all  our  property,  and  then  kick  us 
out  to  starve,  stealing  away  from 
us  the  very  right  to  exist. 

After  these  thieving  parasites 
have  stolen  by  law  our  homes  and 
the  products  of  our  labors,  which 
we  have  worked  like  slaves  to  save, 
they  endeavor  to  teach  us  to  be 
resigned  to  our  lot;  that  it  is  better 
for  us  to  die  of  starvation  than  to 
steal  a  loaf  of  bread  (which  is  more 
valuable  in  their  eyes  than  our  life) 
to  save  our  very  existence.  A 
highwayman,  compared  with  such 
a  low-breed,  is  an  angel  of  light. 
He  will  give  you  a  fighting  chance 
for  your  property  and  will  spare 
your  life;  but  when  these  assassins 
stand  you  up  with  the  law,  it  is 
the  dead-open-and-shut  of  your 
money  and  your  life. 


—  6  — 


THE  EXCEPTION  CLAUSE. 

The  vermin  classes  are  the  fav- 
ored children  of  this  government. 
For  their  exclusive  benefit  the  gov- 
ernment would  not  receive  for  cus- 
toms and  duties  anything  but  Shy- 
lock's  gold,  upon  which  he  has  a 
complete  monopoly,  but  repudiated 
its  own  money  for  such  purposes 
by  placing  an  exception  clause  upon 
it.  Then,  to  still  further  aid  them, 
after  they  had  obtained  hundreds 
of  millions  of  government  green- 
backs through  their  gambling  meth- 
ods, by  depreciating  our  currency, 
they  handed  over  to  them  untaxed 
interest-paying  bonds  to  still  con- 
tinue their  hellish  fleecing  of  the 
people.  By  receiving  in  gold  on 
their  bonds  interest  payable  in  ad- 
vance, they  were  enabled  to  keep 
the  same  gold  moving  around  the 
circle,  and  every  time  harvest  a 
golden  crop  or  greenbacks,  with 
which  they  secured  more  bonds. 

The  government  was  continually 
falling  short  of  gold  sufficient  to 
pay  interest  upon  its  bonds,  and 
became  a  purchaser  in  the  market 
for  Shylock's  gold.  By  this  game 
alone  they  bled  the  nation  to  the 
tune  of  two  thousand  millions,  or 
about  one-half  the  cost  of  the  war. 
At  the  beginning  of  the  war  the 
government  created  sixty  millions 
of  demand  notes,  receivable  for  all 
debts,  public  or  private,  with  no 


exception  clause,  and  they  always 
stood  at  a  par  with  gold. 

When    in   1878  the   government 
was  willing  to  receive  greenbacks 
for  duties  on  imports,  at  the  sug- 
gestion of  General  Weaver,  a  few 
months  prior  to  January  ist,  1879, 
when  the  government   was  to   re- 
sume specie  payment,  it  abolished 
all  premium  on  gold  at  once,  con- 
clusively proving  that  gold   gam- 
bling was  created  by  the  exception 
clause   and    by   the    government's 
repudiating  its  own  money.    Noth- 
ing is  more  clear  or  better  estab- 
lished than  the  fact  that  the  excep- 
tion clause  was  put  on  the  green- 
back by  the  Senate  Committee,  to 
whom  it  was  referred,  at  the  sug- 
gestion of  the  banker  and  the  mon- 
ey gambler,  who  held  a  conference 
with  it.     No  farmers,  mechanics  or 
laboring  men  could  have  had  any 
influence  with   such  a  committee, 
as  men  of  that  class  have  spurned 
with  contempt  any  attempt  to  in- 
fluence legislation  by  boodle,  and 
have   got    nothing   as   the   result. 
When  the  bankers  mention  boodle 
to  the  majority  of  our  legislators, 
it   strikes   them   like    a   streak   of 
lightning,  thrilling  them  from  head 
to  foot;  a  heavenly  smile  flits  over 
their  faces  like  that  of  angels,  and 
they  are  ready  at  any  time  to  eat 
dirt  for  them  or  sell  their  low,  dirty 
souls,    their    daughters,    wives    or 
sons,  for  pelf. 


The  standard  of  morals  of  Jack- 
the- Ripper  transcends  that  of  such 
legislators,  as  the  standard  of  Lin- 
coln, Sumner  or  Clay  transcends 
that  of  Cleveland,  John  Sherman, 
and  Carlisle.  The  Ripper's  victims 
were  women  already  degraded  and 
outcast,  while  our  murderous  laws, 
enacted  for  boodle  by  red-handed, 
anarchistic  legislators,  strike  the 
dagger  up  to  the  hilt  into  the  very 
vitals  of  this  nation,  and  wreck  its 
homes,  give  childhood  and  youth, 
manhood  and  womanhood,  into  the 
very  jaws  of  rapacious  robbers, 
pirates  and  murderers,  who  crush 
into  a  pulp  all  vestige  of  human 
rights,  liberty  and  happiness. 

The  skull  and  cross-bones  now 
overtop  the  stars  and  stripes,  and 
America  is  the  land  of  the  tyrant, 
pirate,  thug  and  slave.  Orphan 
and  lunatic  asylums,  States'  pris- 
ons and  jails — plague-spots  of  civi- 
lization— which  had  hardly  any  ex- 
istence in  the  first  fifty  years  of  the 
nation's  life,  now  overflow  with  in- 
mates and  fill  the  land,  increasing 
fourfold  beyond  the  increase  of  pop- 
ulation. 

The  boodlers  and  driveling  poli- 
tical idiots  now  in  Washington  are 
fiddling  away  at  their  tariff  and 
wooing  a  black  queen  of  doubtful 
morals,  in  the  South  Seas,  to  attract 
attention,  while  the  whole  machin- 
ery of  our  government  is  shotted  to 
mow  down  the  robbed  and  despoiled 


toilers  of  the  land  if  they  dare  re- 
sist the  tyranny  of  capital,  class 
legislation  and  imperial  despotism. 
Hungry  stomachs  will  soon  collapse 
if  fed  upon  tariff  wind-pudding , 
handed  over  to  the  wage  slave  for 
his  vote,  by  corporations,  monopo- 
lies and  money  powers  through  the 
hands  of  the  scurvy  boodle  politi- 
cians. 

The  day  of  settlement  is  near  at 
hand  when  the  veil  of  deception 
shall  be  torn  off  the  voters'  eyes, 
which  have  been  blinded  by  party 
prejudices  and  bigotry.  No  na- 
tion's savage  chiefs,  in  all  the  rec- 
ords of  history,  have  so  unmerci- 
fully sacrificed  its  citizens  or  mem- 
bers, or  put  them  into  a  more 
ferocious  gang  of  cut-throats,  than 
have  those  who  rule  us.  What 
was  once  a  land  of  homes  has  now 
become  a  boarding  and  soup-house 
institution. 

Not  over  one  workman  in  a  hun- 
dred has  a  home  which  he  can  call 
his  own,  and  that  has  a  mortgage 
upon  it,  and  will  be  soon  passed 
over  to  the  money  shark,  who  will 
see  to  it  that  money  is  made  scarce 
so  that  the  interest  cannot  be  met. 
Free  country  !  Grand  government  E 
Tariff  fools  will  fix  this  up. 

About  one-third  of  the  working 
classes  of  America  have  become 
paupers,  tramps  or  criminals,  and 
the  rest  are  rapidly  getting  there. 
Home  and  home  influences  being 


8  — 


destroyed  by  poverty,  the  boys  and 
3*irls  at  eight,  ten  and  twelve  years 
«of  age  are  taken  from  school  and 
forced  to  work  in  the  factories, 
eking  out  a  miserable  existence, 
-competing  for  such  an  existence 
"with  Chinamen  or  the  lowest  grade 
•of  paupers  just  imported  from  Asia 
-and  other  countries,  working  at 
itheir  elbows.  Despairing  under 
;such  conditions  of  ever  having  a 
liome,  they  yield  to  evil  influences; 
<one  becomes  a  rake  and  a  criminal, 
— the  other,  by  starvation  and  idle- 
-ness,  is  forced  to  a  life  of  shame. 

"In  1880,  of  persons  engaged  in 
sail  occupations  in  the  United  States, 
3,118,356  were  children  under  fif- 
teen years  of  age,  and  in  ten  years 
Ihis  class  increased  twenty- one  per 
cent,  more  rapidly  than  the  popu- 
lation."* 

Model  government !  Why,  the 
most  savage  tribes  that  live  to-day, 
that  -ever  did  live,  not  excepting 
the  cannibals,  never  have  had  such 
degrading  conditions  for  their  peo- 
ple as  those  found  under  our  pres- 
ent debauched  system  of  govern- 
ment. 

Christian  civilization !  It  is  a 
mockery — a  sham  !  Why,  it  is  only 
when  the  cannibals  and  savages 
•come  in  contact  with  us  that  their 
liomes  are  destroyed,  low  diseases 
l>red,  and  the  whisky  is  furnished 
Ifoy  us  which  sweeps  them  off  by 
thousands. 

*  Henry  George. 


Politicians  or  political  parties  who 
come  before  the  voters  of  this  coun- 
try to  discuss  the  question  of  tariff 
or  tariff  reform  as  the  way  out  of 
these  difficulties,  know  better,  and 
are  nothing  but  the  mouth-pieces 
and  puppets  of  money  sharks  and 
monopolies,  a  band  of  liars  and 
traitors,  deluding  innocent  victims 
and  a  confiding  people  to  sacrifice 
their  property  and  life  that  they,— 
such  politicians  and  political  parties 
and  the  classes  they  represent, — 
may  still  further  satisfy  their  avar- 
ice, appetites,  passions  and  lusts. 

Such  parties  and  politicians  have 
forfeited  all  right  to  exist.  The 
future  historian  will  paint  the  pic- 
ture of  them  all  dark;  and  when  it 
is  hung  on  the  dark  walls  of  hell, 
its  background  will  be  light.  The 
stench  thereof  will  pervade  the 
whole  earth;  and  the  world  will  be 
forever  contaminated  in  the  reading 
of  it.  When  these  politicians  are 
dead,  they  should  be  buried  at  the 
north  pole,  and  their  carcasses  her- 
metically sealed  with  an  avalanche 
of  snow  and  ice.  Even  this  will 
not  be  sufficient  to  down  their  odor, 
and  the  buzzards  for  ages  will  hover 
over  their  lonely  graves. 

THE  NATIONAL  BANK. 

The  profits  of  the  gold  gamblers 
became  so  great  that  they  immedi- 
ately devised  a  banking  system  to 
still  further  continue  their  gambling 


—  9  — 


and  thieving  business,  and  handed 
it  over  to  their  hireling  puppet, 
John  Sherman,  to  see  it  through; 
and  the  old  arch- traitor  has  stood 
at  the  helm  ever  since,  selling  his 
small  soul  and  the  whole  American 
people  for  his  lust  of  gold.  To 
establish  a  National  bank,  bonds 
had  to  be  issued,  but  to  please 
the  vermin,  not  taxed.  Interest 
had  to  be  given  in  gold,  pay- 
able in  advance.  On  a  hundred 
thousand  dollars  in  bonds  there  was 
handed  over  to  the  banker  by  the 
Controller  of  the  Currency  ninety 
thousand  of  the  people's  notes,  un- 
taxed,  at  one  per  cent,  per  annum 
(about  the  cost  of  printing),  and 
of  these  he  had  absolute  control, 
and  upon  them  he  could,  as  he  let 
them  out  to  the  people,  place  a  tax 
of  from  six  to  twelve  per  cent,  per 
annum.  To  shut  out  all  of  the 
small  fry,  no  one  could  get  such 
privileges,  unless  they  could  put 
up  a  fifty  thousand  dollar  bond. 

A    FICTITIOUS    WAR    DEBT. 

("Shot  and  Shell,"  by  T.  A.  Bland.) 

''At  the  close  of  the  late  Civil 
War  the  national  debt  was  about 
$3,000,000,000.  The  people  gen- 
erally suppose  that  this  entire  sum 
was  necessarily  spent  in  supporting 
the  government  and  putting  down 
the  Rebellion,  in  addition  to  the 
regular  income  of  the  Government. 
This  is  very  far  from  the  truth. 


Full  one-half  of  this  enormous  debt 
represented  commissions  on  bonds, 
interest  on  bonds,  and  discounts 
on  Government  money  in  buying 
coin  to  pay  interest,  etc.,  etc. 

"The  total  expenditures  of  the 
Government  for  1862  were  $475, 
000,000.  According  to  the  report 
of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury, 
$15,000,000  of  this  was  for  the  in- 
terest on  the  public  debt,  $64,000,- 
ooo  of  it  discount,  and  $65,000,- 
ooo  received  for  taxes,  leaving  only 
$341,000,000  of  a  debt. 

"  In  1863  the  expense  of  the 
Government  was  $7 1 5, ooo, ooo.  Of 
this  sum  interest,  discount  and 
taxes  make  up  $310,000,000,  leav- 
ing a  balance  of  actual  debt  of 
$405,000,000. 

"In  1864  the  public  expendi- 
tures were  $865,000,000.  Of  this 
sum  $78,000,000  was  paid  in  inter- 
est, $505,000,000  on  discounts,  and 
$264,000,000  received  from  taxes, 
leaving  only  $18,000,000  legitimate 
public  debt.  The  public  expendi- 
tures for  1865  amounted  to  $1,297,- 
000,000.  Of  this  sum  $77,000,000 
was  for  interest,  $389,000,000  dis- 
count, and  $338,000,000  taxes  re- 
ceived, leaving  only  $493,000,000 
net  honest  public  debt. 

"  If  the  Government  had  con- 
tinued the  policy  inaugurated  in 
1 86 1,  of  meeting  the  public  expen- 
ditures over  anl  abov*  taxes  by 
the  issue  of  legal  tender  currency, 


10  


there  would  have  been  at  the  close 
of  the  war  $1,257,000,000  Govern- 
ment paper  money  in  circulation, 
and  not  a  dollar  of  public  debt. 
From  this  showing  it  is  clear  that 
the  people  were  robbed  of  over 
$2,000,000,000  during  the  war; 
that  this  robbery  has  been  going 
on  ever  since  in  the  form  of  inter- 
est on  an  unnecessary  public  debt, 
and  that  we  still  owe,  after  hav- 
ing paid  over  $5,000,000,000,  prin- 
cipal and  interest,  nearly  as  much 
as  the  actual  cost  of  the  Govern- 
ment during  the  war.  This  money 
has  gone  out  of  the  pockets  of 
the  producing  classes  into  the 
pockets  of  the  non-producing 
classes,  through  a  system  of 
financial  legerdemain,  deliberately 
planned  and  persistently  carried 
out." 

This  money  belonged  to  the  peo- 
ple, and  was  as  necessary  to  their 
national  life  as  blood  is  to  the 
body  ;  but  the  bondholders,  bank- 
er?, and  money  sharks  demanded 
that  it  be  burned  up.  "  Mr.  Bout- 
well,  Secretary  of  the  Treasury, 
in  his  report  in  1872,  says  on  page 
297,  that  $1,808,314,475.69  of 
money  was  destroyed."  As  it  seri- 
riously  interfered  with  the  bankers' 
profits  it  was  consigned  to  the 
flames,  or  re-issued,  and  a  debt  of 
about  $3,000,000,000  was  put  upon 
the  nation — which  they  had  no 
more  moral  right  to  put  than  to 


take  the  torch  of  the  vandal  and 
burn  all  the  homes  in  the  land. 

What  we  have  paid  on  this  debt 
in  principal  and  interest  together, 
with  what  we  still  owe,  amounts  to 
over  six  thousand  millions.  The 
amount  which  we  owe  to-day  will 
take  over  one- third  more  of  cotton, 
iron,  wheat,  and  more  of  labor's 
products,  to  pay  it  off  than  it  would 
have  done  at  the  close  of  the 
war,  after  paying  on  the  prin- 
cipal $1,500,000,000.  The  banks, 
founded  on  these  bonds,  have  paid 
in  dividends  six  thousand  millions 
of  dollars,  robbed  from  the  indus- 
tries of  the  country.  No  wonder 
the  venomous  traitors  keep  up  the 
tariff  howl,  to  attract  the  attention 
of  the  farmer,  mechanic  and  la- 
borer from  the  true  issues,  and  cre- 
ate dissention  and  strife  in  their 
ranks — they  must  keep  his  mind 
diverted  while  they  skin  him  and 
tan  his  very  hide. 

The  sacredness  of  life,  the  strug- 
gles of  the  poor,  the  pleadings  of 
the  weak  for  help,  the  wail  of  an- 
guish that  comes  from  the  poverty- 
stricken  homes,  meets  with  no  re- 
sponse ;  they  still  plunge  the  dag- 
ger deeper  into  the  bosom  of  the 
fallen  form  of  humanity.  What  a 
difference  we  behold  when  we  look 
at  the  treatment  by  the  Govern- 
ment of  these  parasites  !  What  a 
kind  father  it  has  been  to  them, 
ever  ready  to  answer  their  beck 


—  II  — 


and  call,  and  to  drive  to  the  wall 
all  of  their  enemies,  or  those  upon 
whom  they  may  wish  to  prey. 
Nothing  but  the  most  choice  swans- 
down  will  suffice  for  their  couch. 
The  canopy  of  their  chamber  must 
be  fretted  with  golden  fire.  Pic- 
tures of  heavenly  visitants  throw 
the  glow  of  light  and  love  o'er 
their  sleeping  form.  Their  dreams 
of  the  night  are  set  in  pearls 
or  rubies  or  diamonds,  unpierced 
by  one  minor  strain  of  sadness. 
Egyptian  vases  of  flowers  adorn 
the  room  and  fill  it  with  their  fra- 
grance. Servants  attend  their 
waking,  and  fly  to  do  their  bidding 
through  the  day.  Highly -favored 
child  of  man!  Why  so  exalted, 
and  we  so  abased?  Why  should 
you  have  the  roses,  and  we  get  the 
thorns  ?  Why  should  you  be  priv- 
ileged to  feed  upon  the  products  of 
our  bone  and  sinew,  and  we  perish 
with  hunger  ? 

We  now  know  your  secret.  You 
have  found  that  legislation  is  the 
magnet  of  power  for  good  or  ill, 
with  an  affinity  for  gold.  By  this 
magic  wand  you  have  diverted  this 
current  from  its  true  object — the 
whole  people — and  it  now  admin- 
isters to  your  greed  of  gain  and 
love  of  luxury,  and  panders  to  all 
your  wants  and  appetites  ;  while 
poverty  is  bred,  crime  engendered, 
and  destitution  and  want  stalk 
through  the  land  with  their  skele- 
ton forms  because  of  it. 


CREDIT  STRENGTHENING 
ACT. 

After  the  war,  foreign  and  Amer- 
ican bondholders,  who  Had  pur- 
chased the  bonds,  sought  through 
Congress  to  have  them  paid  in 
coin.  "  Payable  for  all  debts,  pub- 
lic and  private,  except  for  duties 
on  imports  and  interest  on  the  pub- 
lic debt"  is  printed  on  the  back  of 
every  greenback.  When  a  party 
purchased  a  bond  of  the  Govern- 
ment by  the  greenback,  it  became 
a  public  debt  of  the  Government, 
and  was  payable  by  the  greenback, 
as  declared  on  its  back,  so  simple 
that  it  cannot  be  misunderstood. 
Nothing  can  be  more  plain. 

The  low  boodle  nature  of  our 
Congressman  is  known  all  over  the 
world.  A  sack  was  soon  gotten  up 
by  the  bondholders,  passed  over  to 
the  Congressmen,  and  then  they 
formulated  a  bill,  called  "An  Act 
to  strengthen  the  public  credit," 
which  was  immediately  passed  by 
an  extra  session  of  Congress,  called 
expressly  for  that  purpose. 

It  was  the  first  Act  of  the  body. 
The  bill  was  passed  after  midnight 
and  was  signed  by  Grant  at  the 
White  House,  a  mile  away  from 
the  Capitol,  twenty  minutes  after 
its  passage,  March  18,  1869.  This 
was  four  years  after  the  close  of  the 
war,  when  the  Government  was 
paying  its  debt  at  the  rate  of  two 
to  nine  million  dollars  a  month. 


12 


The  immediate  increase  of  value 
to  the  bondholders  was  more  than 
double.  This  brazen-faced  robbery 
cost  th*e  taxpayers  one  thousand 
millions  of  dollars,  five  hundred 
millions  of  it  enriching  the  foreign 
bondholder.  Both  parties  are  al- 
ways accomplices  to  these  conspira- 
cies, and  divide  the  spoils  between 
them.  General  Weaver  brought  a 
bill  before  the  House  to  pay  the 
soldiers  the  difference  between  the 
currency  they  were  paid  in  and 
gold,  but  these  traitors  defeated  it. 
The  soldiers,  who  tore  themselves 
away  from  the  happy  firesides,  and 
stood  up  to  brave  the  leaden  ball 
on  the  battlefield  for  their  country, 
could  get  no  recognition  from  these 
boodlers,  although  promised  at  the 
beginning  of  the  war  that  they 
should  be  paid  in  gold. 

THE    DEMONETIZATION    OF 
SILVER. 

Hardly  had  the  credit-strength- 
ening Act  been  passed,  before  these 
thieves  were  again  planning  an- 
other of  greater  magnitude,  in  the 
demonetization  of  silver.  The 
credit-strengthening  Act  has  made 
the  bonds  payable  in  coin,  which 
was  both  silver  and  gold.  Greed 
and  avarice  knew  no  bounds.  We 
can  obtain  a  faint  idea  of  the 
greedy,  thieving  nature  of  our  ene- 
mies, to  whom  we  have  been  sacri- 
ficed by  immoral  monstrosities 


called  Congressmen,  by  noting 
their  further  acts.  A  robbing 
scheme  that  had  increased  their 
wealth  to  one  thousand  million  dol- 
lars at  a  single  stroke  was  not 
enough  to  satisfy  these  wretches. 

Silver  might  be  good  enough  for 
the  wage  slave,  but  was  nauseating 
to  their  dainty  appetites,  which 
could  only  relish  gold. 

Ernest  Seyd,  an  Englishman, 
visited  America  in  the  winter  of 
1872-3,  representing  the  governors 
of  the  Bank  of  England,  and  also 
some  German  bankers,  bringing 
with  him  $500,000  in  British  gold. 
He  interviewed  the  committees  of 
the  House  and  the  Senate,  and  an 
Act  was  introduced  in  his  hand- 
writing, called  "An  Act  revising 
and  amending  the  laws  relative  to 
the  mints,  assay  offices  and  coin- 
age of  the  United  States."  The 
bill  contained  sixty-seven  sections, 
and  in  one  section  the  dollar  was 
omitted,  and  hence  it  ceased  to  be 
a  coin  of  the  United  States.  Sub- 
sidiary coin  was  now  all  the  silver 
coin  in  existence,  and  was  a  legal 
tender  for  less  than  five  dollars. 
The  bondholders  could  now  de- 
mand and  obtain  their  principal 
and  interest  in  gold  coin,  while 
demonetized  silver,  good  only  to 
the  amount  of  five  dollars,  was 
good  enough  for  the  wage  slave. 

The  difference  between  gold  and 
silver  at  this  time  was  at  least  80 


to  100,  and  this  difference  of 
twenty  per  cent,  to  gold  would 
amount  to  five  hundred  million 
dollars.  Figuring  from  what  the 
public  debt  then  was,  and  the  in- 
terest during  all  these  years,  it 
would  amount  to  that  much  more, 
making  a  cool  billion  dollar  steal. 
Honest  John  Sherman  took  the 
boodle  for  the  Senate,  and  distrib- 
uted it  among  his  Republican  and 
Democratic  associates,  while  saintly 
Hooper,  of  Massachusetts,  had 
charge  of  it  in  the  House,  and  fol- 
lowed his  brother  John's  example. 

If  there  is  no  hell  for  such  men, 
then  there  is  no  justice ;  and  if 
there  is  no  justice,  then  there  is  no 
God.  Why,  the  standard  of  mor- 
ality in  hell  is  so  high  compared 
to  that  of  these  men  that  all  hell 
will  hiss  them  when  they  make 
their  advent  there. 

America,  in  all  its  history  never 
received  a  more  fatal  stab.  Palsied 
and  crippled,  as  it  then  was,  its 
former ,  greatness  has  never  re- 
turned. Incumbered  with  thirty- 
two  thousand  million  dollars  of 
debt,  upon  which  it  pays  an  annual 
interest  of  two  thousand  millions, 
far  beyond  all  the  productive  re- 
sources of  the  country,  with  feeble 
footsteps,  it  to-day  trembles  on 
the  verge  of  ruin.  The  demon- 
etization oi  silver  was  accom- 
plished when  the  output  of  our 
silver  mines  would  have  come  to 


the  rescue  of  our  country,  and 
would  have  given  us  a  me- 
dium of  exchange  that  would  have 
taken  the  place  of  the  destroyed 
greenbacks.  Free  coinage  of  silver 
would  have  added  hundreds  of  mil- 
lions to  our  circulating  medium, 
and  would  have  destroyed  the  mo- 
nopoly of  money  now  in  the  hands 
of  a  few  gold  bugs.  It  would  have 
destroyed  to  a  great  extent  the 
credit  debt,  the  interest  system,— 
all  the  result  of  a  contracted  cur- 
rency controlled  and  monopolized 
by  a  few  for  their  own  selfish  ends. 
The  Englishman  would  be  obliged 
to  pay  $1.29  for  his  ounce  of  silver, 
which  he  now  gets  for  60  cents,  to 
have  his  bushel  of  wheat  laid  down 
in  Liverpool  from  India;  and  the 
American  farmer  would  receive 
$1.29  instead  of  50  cents,  the  pres- 
ent price  for  his  wheat.  It  would 
have  opened  the  trade  of  Mexico, 
Central  America,  South  America 
and  China,  the  principal  part  of 
which  is  now  held  by  England. 

Finding  that  people  could  be  de- 
ceived and  kept  in  ignorance  by  an 
hireling  press,  these  robbers  have 
continued  to  repeat  their  infamous 
work  with  more  frequency  and 
brazen  effrontery,  until  to-day,  from 
the  chief  executive  down,  they 
trample  the  laws  of  the  nation  un- 
der foot  and  flaunt  their  defiance  in 
our  face. 

The   refusal  of  the  President  to 


14  — 


enforce  the  Chinese  Registration 
Act,  declared  constitutional  by  the 
United  States  Supreme  Court, 
stamps  him  a  perjurer,  a  typical 
anarchist,  and  a  defier  of  the  laws 
of  the  land  he  swore  to  enforce. 

THE  GOLD  RESERVE. 

The  holding  in  reserve  of  one 
hundred  millions  in  gold  coin,  for 
the  purpOvSe  of  redeeming  the 
greenback,  and  upon  which  we 
have  already  paid  for  bonds  issued 
to  obtain  it  nearly  sixty  millions 
of  dollars  in  interest,  is  without 
any  authority  of  law  whatever,  and 
was  admitted  even  by  Carlisle  to 
Culbertson  before  his  committee  in 
January,  1894,  in  the  following 
statement :  ' '  As  a  matter  of  fact 
there  is  not  and  never  has  been  an 
actual  aggregation  of  $100,000,000 
of  gold ,  or  any  other  sum  from  ttie 
other  funds  of  the  treasury.  There 
is  no  law  on  the  subject  requiring  the 
Secretary  to  maintain  a  gold  reserve. 
It  is  a  mere  fiction,  a  bookkeeper's 
device.  *  *  *  //  is  based  upon 
an  assumption." 

Bonds  upon  which  we  have  al- 
ready paid  sixty  million  dollars  of 
interest,  were  issued  by  the  chief 
of  all  boodlers,  John  Sherman,  un- 
der a  Republican  administration, 
to  obtain  a  hundred  million  dollars 
in  coin,  and  it  has  met  with  the 
full  approval  of  the  Democratic 
administration. 


Cleveland  and  Carlisle  have  gone 
even  further:  They  have  issued 
bonds  to  keep  up  an  ill-gotten 
reserve  fund,  which  is  contrary  to 
the  laws  of  Congress,  which  espe- 
cially declare  that  there  shall  not 
be  ' '  any  increase  whatever  of  the 
bonded  debt  of  the  United  States. ' ' 

Here  we  have  the  strange  spec- 
tacle of  one  party  setting  at  defi- 
ance the  law  of  the  land,  while  the 
other  party  seconds  it,  and  even 
exceeds  their  action  by  still  greater 
violation  of  law.  This  absurd  farce 
of  government  is  at  an  end,  and  in 
the  next  act  the  people  will  appear 
and  ring  down  the  curtain  upon 
the  scene.  Our  halls  of  legislation 
throughout  the  land  are  simply 
slaughter  houses  where  human 
rights  and  liberty  are  butchered, 
and  hell  prepared  for  us,  instead  of 
happiness. 

Within  the  last  thirty  years  there 
has  been  scarcely  an  Act  passed  in 
the  interest  of  the  masses.  In  the 
past  they  have  flaunted  the  bloody 
shirt  in  our  faces,  and  now  are  dis- 
cussing the  tariff  question  as  one 
of  vital  interest  to  the  working 
classes,  simply  to  blind  them  as  to 
the  true  issues. 

SPECIE  PAYMENT. 

11  Resumption"  and  "specie  pay- 
ment" mean  simply  that  all  the 
property  and  wealth  of  the  nation 
must  be  placed  in  the  hands  and  at 


the  mercy  of  cruel  robbers,  who 
have  a  monopoly  upon  a  certain 
metal,  which  they  can  contract, 
expand  or  control  its  volume,  and, 
by  gambling  methods,  wrest  from 
us  our  property  and  wealth  and 
starve  our  lives.  The  total  amount 
of  gold  in  circulation  in  the  United 
States  does  not  exceed  five  hundred 
million,  while  the  property  and 
wealth  of  the  nation  is  sixty- five 
billion.  The  proportion  is  about 
five  dollars  in  gold  to  one  thousand 
dollars  of  property.  Gold  being 
made  the  basis  of  value,  the  whole 
property  and  wealth  of  the  United 
States  can  be  closed  out  for  five 
hundred  million  in  gold,  and  there 
is  no  power  on  earth  that  can  save 
it  when  the  gold  is  under  the 
complete  control  of  monopoly,  as 
it  now  is. 

The  proportion  being  five  dollars 
in  gold,  being  the  base  of  all  value, 
to  $1,000  of  property  valuation, 
withdraw  one  dollar  from  the  base 
and  you  will  have  a  shrinkage  of 
$200  in  property  valuation.  With- 
draw $2.50  and  you  reduce  property 
valuation  one-half;  for  if  there  is  not 
sufficient  currency  in  circulation  to 
effect  exchange  of  values,  prices 
will  fall,  and  the  purchasing  value 
of  money  is  enhanced.  To  further 
reduce  it  will  produce  stagnation 
and  death,  for  no  civilized  society 
can  live  without  some  medium  of 
exchange. 


Any  one  individual  or  corpora- 
tion that  can  secure  the  exclusive 
control  of  the  money  of  any  city, 
state  or  nation,  is  possessed  of  its 
very  life  blood,  and  will  as  certainly 
devour  its  property  and  destroy  its 
life  as  would  a  pack  of  hungry 
wolves.  These  money  men  are 
cruel,  pitiless  and  devoid  of  all 
human  feeling.  The  wail  of  an- 
guish, the  cry  of  want,  and  the 
silent  appeal  for  help  that  wells 
forth  from  a  starving  multitude,  is 
met  by  their  scoffs,  mocks  and  jeers. 
We  have  as  certainly  been  betrayed 
into  the  hands  of  these  shylocks, 
as  was  Jesus  Christ  betrayed  by 
Judas  Iscariot  into  the  hands  of  the 
Jews.  The  instincts  of  humanity 
were  far  more  noble  in  Judas  than 
in  these  traitors,  for  he  repented 
and  hung  himself,  while  our .  be- 
trayers glory  at  each  ignoble  act. 

GREENBACKS. 

The  government  issued  to  its 
people  the  currency  (greenbacks) 
without  interest,  to  facilitate  their 
exchange  of  products.  This  issue 
of  currency  to  the  people  direct  by 
the  government  to  meet  current 
expenses,  or  for  public  improve- 
ments, if  continued  in,  would  be 
destructive  to  all  banking  institu- 
tions, bondholders  and  money-lend- 
ers, as  the  government  could  issue 
sufficient  for  all  business  require- 
ments, thereby  completely  killing 


—  16  — 


the  credit,  debt  and  interest  system, 
and  with  it  all  of  the  low  institu- 
tions that  prey  upon  productive 
industry.  Paper  or  rag  money  is 
valueless  to  the  banker  unless  it 
can  be  passed  through  his  hands 
for  his  tax  stamp  upon  it,  when  it 
immediately  becomes  good  money, 
because  it  is  dear;  but  if  issued  by 
the  government  directly  to  the  peo- 
ple without  this  tax  stamp  upon  it, 
it  becomes  cheap  money,  and  hence 
he  considers  it  no  good. 

Through  boodle  legislation  the 
greenbacks  (money  without  inter- 
est) were  taken  up  and  destroyed, 
or  reissued — which  amount  to  the 
same  thing — in  the  creation  of  a 
bonded  debt,  and,  in  their  stead, 
the  bankers  were  given  untaxed 
interest  -  bearing  bonds,  —  interest 
payable  in  gold  coin  in  advance, — 
and  upon  this  they  were  given  90 
per  cent,  of  machine-printed  bank 
notes  at  one  per  cent,  per  annum, 
without  any  legal  tender  qualities, 
unredeemable  in  gold,  and  redeem- 
able in  the  legal  tender  greenback, 
(specie  basis  is  only  for  the  suckers) 
of  which  they  have  complete  con- 
trol. They  then  hand  over  to  the 
people  their  debts  a  promise  to  pay, 
with  a  tax  upon  it  ranging  from 
five  to  twenty -four  per  cent,  per 
annum,  living  upon  the  interest  of 
what  they  owe,. besides  drawing  an 
additional  interest  upon  their  un- 
taxed bonds. 


In  the  name  of  God  and  human- 
ity !  what  moral  right  have  these 
infamous  traitors  to  wrest  and  rob 
the  people  of  their  untaxed  me- 
dium of  exchange, — wholly  their 
own  and  the  product  of  their 
industry, — burn  it  up,  and  by  so 
doing  deliver  us  into  the  hands  of 
rapacious  robbers  and  vile  gam- 
blers, through  the  bond  system, 
upon  which  is  builded  a  banking 
system,  the  most  iniquitous  and  the 
most  blood-sucking  parasite  that 
ever  preyed  upon  human  kind. 

Within  the  short  space  of  thirty- 
two  years  it  has  clogged  every 
wheel  of  industry  with  debt,  mort- 
gaged nine  millions  of  its  homes, 
fettered  and  enslaved  a  once  free 
people  to  the  most  inhuman,  re- 
vengeful and  unmerciful  of  masters. 
The  people  must  be  made  to  see 
that  this  robbery  is  accomplished 
by  levying  a  tax,  not  upon  the 
value  exchanged,  but  upon  a  medi- 
um of  exchange  of  values,  which 
in  and  of  itself  has  legal,  but  no 
intrinsic  value  whatever;  that  it  is 
a  stamp,  a  decree  of  law  to  ef- 
fect an  exchange  of  values  behind 
which  stands  all  the  wealth  and 
the  property  of  the  government  to 
make  such  exchange  good. 

MONEY   HAS   A   LEGAL  BUT 
NO  INTRINSIC  VALUE. 

It  is  a  certificate  of  indebtedness 
of  society  for  labor  or  labor  prod- 


—  1.7- 


ucts,  which  it  stands  ready  to  honor 
when  presented,  such  certificate 
being  of  no  intrinsic  value  nor 
representing  any,  and  when  taxed 
is  nothing  but  legalized  robbery, 
as  it  is  a  tax  upon  merely  a  decree 
of  law.  There  is  no  other  money 
but  fiat  money,  and  any  material 
the  government  may  select,  either 
dear  or  cheap,  becomes  money  when 
it  has  the  fiat  of  the  government. 

The  people  have  had  enough  of 
the  trickery  of  the  ' '  specie  basis ' ' 
played  upon  them  by  this  govern- 
ment and  its  banking  institutions, 
when  they  have  no  more  than  one 
dollar  in  coin  to  redeem  346  cents 
in  circulation.  No  fool  needs  to 
be  told  that  the  whole  sixty-five 
thousand  millions  of  wealth  of  this 
nation  is  better  security  for  three 
hundred  and  forty-six  millions  of 
currency,  than  one  hundred  mil- 
lions Of  gold  BELONGING  TO  THE 

NATION'S  WEALTH  heaped  up  in  the 
Treasury  vaults  at  Washington. 

The  cry  of  redemption  to  money 
is  all  rot.  Money  is  the  very  life- 
blood  of  the  nation,  and  should  be 
increased  to  such  an  amount  that 
all  of  the  exchanges  of  values  could 
be  effected  on  a  cash  basis.  All 
that  is  necessary  is  for  the  govern- 
ment to  make  it  payable  for  all 
debts  without  an  exception  clause, 
receive  it,  and  put  it  out  again  in 
circulation.  There  is  no  redeem- 
ing feature  about  it  except  as  it 


may  pay  a  debt,  and  be  passed 
on  for  like  purposes.  Professor 
Browning  Price  says  :  "  Money  is 
a  tool  of  exchange,  nothing  more. 
It  is  not  a  measure  of  values,  nor  a 
standard  of  measures,  nor  a  repre- 
sentative of  property.  It  transfers 
property  conveniently  from  one 
party  to  another,  as  a  wagon  hauls 
goods  from  one  place  to  another." 
The  Supreme  Court  of  Iowa  says  : 
"The  gold  dollar  is  not  a  commod- 
ity having  an  intrinsic  value,  but 
money  having  a  statutory  value, 
and  each  dollar  has  the  same  value 
without  regard  to  the  material. 
The  gold  dollar  has  not  an  intrinsic 
value." 

This  idiocy  of  our  Government 
officials  and  financiers  is  so  ludi- 
crous that  if  they  attempted  to  ex- 
plain their  money  methods  to  a 
common  jackass  he  would  resent 
the  insult  offered  to  his  intelli- 
gence. Hear  the  fools  bleat  about 
the  Government  issuing  irredeem- 
able currency,  when  even  an  idiot 
can  teach  them  that  the  Govern- 
ment never  yet  issued  one  dollar  of 
currency  but  behind  it  was  every 
citizen,  every  dollar  of  wealth,  and 
every  foot  of  land  in  the  nation  to 
make  it  good,  so  long  as  it  was 
legal  tender  for  all  debts. 

It  is  the  imperative  duty,  and 
the  constitutional  right,  of  this 
Government  to  create  its  own 
money  (greenback  or  coin)  and  de- 


OF  TH» 


—  i8  — 


clare  the  value  thereof,  and  forever 
free  us  from  the  enforced  slavery  of 
issuing  interest-bearing  bonds  to 
obtain  money  which  we  have 
power  to  create. 

The  money  created  by  the  Gov- 
ernment can  be  put  into  circulation 
in  public  improvements,  such  as 
reservoiring  the  rivers  of  our 
mountains  for  the  reclaiming  of 
the  desert  lands,  the  building  of 
good  roads,  post-offices,  dredging  of 
harbors  and  improvement  of  the 
water-ways,  to  the  extent  of  three 
or  four  billions  of  dollars.  By  such 
method,  the  wealth  of  the  nation 
would  be  increased  to  double  the 
amount  of  the  money  issued,  be- 
sides giving  to  the  people  a  cur- 
rency sufficient  to  transact  all  their 
commercial  and  business  affairs  on 
a  cash  basis.  This  increase  of 
wealth  by  the  issue  of  currency  for 
public  improvements  to  the  nation 
would  be  ample  security  for  it,  and 
it  is  with  a  contemptuous  sneer 
that  we  turn  away  from  the  gold- 
bug  rot  of  redemption  of  money 
by  a  certain  metal  of  supposed  in- 
trinsic value,  upon  which  they 
hold  a  complete  monopoly,  and 
that  places  all  lands,  labor  and 
wealth  within  the  grasp  of  unmer- 
ciful, gambling  money  sharks,  who 
shrivel  and  shrink  all  securities 
within  its  narrow  limits. 

A  banking  corporation  has  se- 
cured a  monopoly  upon  a  cer- 


tain metal,  called  gold,  and, 
through  boodle  influence,  it  has 
enacted  a  law  that  nothing  in  the 
land  can  become  money  except 
this  metal,  which  is  to  receive  the 
Government  stamp.  The  banker 
has  now  secured  the  complete 
monopoly  of  money  in  the  form  of 
bank  notes  and  gold  coin.  He. 
contracts  and  expands  it  to  suit  his 
own  selfish  interest.  He  charges 
high  rates  of  interest,  and  makes 
the  metal  scarce,  to  increase  his 
profits.  He  compounds  his  inter- 
est, and  his  wealth  increases  with 
lightning  rapidity. 

One  penny  loaned  at  eight  per 
cent,  when  Columbus  discovered 
America,  if  compounded,  would 
amount  to  four  times  the  value  of 
the  property  of  the  United  States. 

Compound  interest  methods  do 
not  work  with  sufficient  rapidity  to 
suit  these  robbers  ;  they  want  the 
earth,  and  they  must  have  it  at 
once.  They  invent  hellish  schemes 
to  gather  in  golden  harvests,  every 
eight  or  ten  years. 

Within  the  last  eighty  years 
there  have  been  thirteen  of  these 
death-dealing  strokes  given  to  the 
business  industries  of  the  country, 
brought  about  by  schemers,  who 
fatten  upon  the  desolation  of  the 
land,  and  the  wreck  of  human  life. 
Their  method  is  to  keep  money 
scarce  ;  that  creates  credit,  and 
credit  means  loans,  discounts  and 


—  19  — 


debts,  and  these  mean  profits  and 
interest.  Interest  means  that  the 
principal  shall  return  again,  bring- 
ing its  securities  with  it.  Through 
the  scarcity  of  money,  high  rates 
are  charged  upon  all  the  loans, 
discounts  and  mortgages.  This 
continues,  till  a  vast  sum  of  money 
has  been  loaned  out,  when  sud- 
denly a  great  change  takes  place. 

These  money  gamblers  are  now 
playing  for  great  stakes,  and  enter 
into  a  conspiracy  with  one  another 
to  pounce  down  upon  the  property 
and  securities  of  those  whom  they 
now  have  at  their  mercy.  All  is 
previously  arranged,  and,  upon  a 
certain  day  selected  by  them,  every 
bank  in  the  country  stops  loaning 
money,  calls  in  its  loans,  and  re- 
fuses to  discount  commercial  paper. 
A  stringency  is  at  once  felt  in  the 
money  market,  business  becomes 
paralyzed,  and  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands are  thrown  out  of  employ- 
ment. Those  having  loans,  debts 
and  mortgages  cannot  meet  their 
obligations,  or  pay  their  interest  ; 
foreclosures  follow,  and  the  banker 
secures  their  property,  or  security 
at  one-third  of  its  value. 

At  a  bankers'  convention,  held 
in  San  Francisco  in  February,  1894, 
an  article  was  read  by  Benjamin  C. 
Wright,  in  which  he  stated  that 
January  of  1893  "showed  a  larger 
business,  as  gauged  by  the  bank 
clearing  of  the  country,  than  any 


previous   corresponding  month  for 
several  years. 

February    was  nearly    as    good, 
and   better  than   any  February  in 
the  three  years  previous  to  1892. 
March  was  better  than  February, 
and  better  than  any  March  for  the 
previous  four  years.    April  was  the 
lightest  of   the  first  four  months, 
but  not  much  under  that  month  in 
1892.     The  first  third  of  the  year 
passed  with  really  a  better  record 
from  a  bank's  standpoint  than  had 
been  known  for  any  corresponding 
period  in  several  years.    As  usual, ' ' 
he  states,  "the  first  wail  emanated 
from  Wall  street."      The  telegram, 
sent    broadcast,      contained    these 
words:   "The  tension   in  the  com- 
munity  is  great,    but  the  general 
comment   is   one   of   surprise  that 
there  are  so  few  failures.     Every- 
body   is    looking    for    trouble    to 
come."     All   of    this   is   fully  ex- 
plained by  the  following  panic  bul- 
letin, issued  by  the  banking  con- 
spirators against   our  property  and 
our  life  : 

THE   PANIC  BULLETINS. 

[Issued  March  12,  1893,  by  Bankers'  Association 
to  all  National  Banks.] 

"DEAR  SIR:  The  interests  of  the 
National  Bankers  require  immedi- 
ate financial  legislation  by  Con- 
gress. Silver  certificates  and  treas- 
ury notes  must  be  retired,  and  the 
National  Bank  notes  upon  a  gold 


20  — 


basis  made  the  only  money.  This 
will  require  the  authorization  of 
from  $500, 000,000  to $1,000,000,000 
of  new  bonds  as  a  basis  of  circula- 
tion. You  will  at  once  retire  one- 
third  of  your  circulation,  and  call  in 
one-half  of  your  loans.  Be  careful 
to  make  a  money  stringency  felt 
among  our  patrons,  especially 
among  the  influential  business 
men.  Advocate  an  extra  session 
of  Congress  for  the  repeal  of  the 
purchase  clause  of  the  Sherman 
law,  and  act  with  the  banks  of 
your  city  in  securing  a  large  peti- 
tion to  Congress  for  its  uncondi- 
tional repeal.  Use  personal  influ- 
ence with  Congressmen,  and  par- 
ticularly let  your  wishes  be  known 
to  your  Senators.  The  future  life 
of  National  Banks  as  fixed  and 
safe  investments  depends  upon  im- 
mediate action,  as  there  is  an  in- 
creasing sentiment  in  favor  of  Gov- 
ernment legal  tender  notes  and  sil- 
ver coinage." 

This  circular  shows  the  direct 
cause  of  our  financial  panics,  and 
the  conspirators'  method  of  assas- 
sinating a  once  free  people. 

Such  hellish  fiends  as  these,  that 
prey  upon  life  and  property,  are 
backed  up  by  the  laws  of  our  land, 
enacted  by  slimy  boodlers,  whose 
conception  of  morals  are  so  low, 
warped  and  blunted  that  they  can 
perceive  no  difference  between  the 


morals  of  Jesus  Christ  and  those  of 
a  Nero. 

Mr.  Wright  still  adds:  "This 
factor,  the  want  of  sufficient  ready 
money  to  meet  demand  obligations, 
is  at  the  bottom  of  every  business 
failure.  There  are  times  in  the  ex- 
istence of  every  bank  when  noth- 
ing but  money  can  keep  its  doors 
open." 

Now,  mark  you,  Mr.  Wright 
does  not  say  that  there  is  not 
enough  property  or  wealth  in  the 
country,  neither  does  he  say  it  is 
the  tariff  question,  over-production 
or  lack  of  confidence  ;  but  the 
great  and  only  crying  need  of  the 
country  is  MONEY.  It  is  the  key- 
note of  the  situation.  It  is  what 
we  all  want,  all  are  looking  after, 
and  can't  find.  The  most  sacred 
duties  and  obligations  of  a  Govern- 
ment is  to  provide  its  subjects  with 
money,  without  which  we  cannot 
exist. 

When  the  Government  proves 
recreant  to  such  trusts,  and  puts 
upon  us  more  bonded  indebtedness, 
when  it  could  bring  relief  to  perish- 
ing millions  within  twenty-four 
hours  by  the  creation  of  more 
money, we  are  justified  in  branding 
them  as  the  lowest  set  of  hellish 
imps  that  have  ever  been  dug  up 
from  the  slime-pits  of  hell. 

Mr.  Wright  still  adds:  "The 
paid-up  capital  of  these  banks  is 
$1,084,607,600,  while  the  amount 


21 


due  depositors  is  $2,736,836, 100,  ac- 
cording to  the  Controller  of  the 
Currency's  report."  How  these 
banks  can  pay  $2,736,836,100  with 
only  $1,084,600,000  of  capital  is 
past  comprehension.  Henry  Carey 
Baird,  who  is  acknowledged  to  be 
one  of  the  best  authorities  in 
America  on  money,  says  in  regard 
to  the  same  subject  "that  such  a 
small  amount  of  capital  cannot  pay 
the  amount  due  depositors,  anyone 
fit  to  be  outside  of  a  lunatic  or  an 
idiot  asylum  knows,"  and  further 
adds  :  "  But  these  banks,  in  the  at- 
tempt to  keep  this  windbag  from 
bursting,  are  at  work  in  precipita- 
ting a  crisis  in  the  country,  and  it 
will  not  be  their  fault  if  they  do 
not  succeed." 

The  amounts  due  depositors, 
when  demanded,  have  to  be  paid 
within  a  specified  time.  In  1890 
the  Controller  of  the  Currency  re- 
ported that  the  circulating  medium 
of  the  nation  was  nine  hundred 
million,  and  is  now  not  in  excess 
of  one  billion  in  circulation.  The 
reason  why  deposits  in  the  bank 
are  three  dollars  to  one  in  excess 
of  the  circulating  medium  is  be- 
cause the  same  dollar  is  loaned  and 
re-loaned  different  times,  and  each 
time  the  banker  receive  his  interest 
out  of  it.  His  discounts  reap  him 
another  harvest  of  profits.  A  bank 
begins  business,  depending  upon 
depositors  for  money  to  make  their 


loans.  In  the  morning  a  business 
man  deposits  one  thousand  dollars. 
Later  in  the  day  a  real  estate  agent 
asks  him  for  a  loan  of  seven  hun- 
dred dollars.  They  proceed  to  the 
bank,  and  the  business  man  offers 
to  indorse  his  friend's  paper  for 
seven  hundred  dollars,  but  such  in- 
dorsement is  refused  by  the  bank, 
although  he  has  deposited  there 
one  thousand  dollars.  The  bank 
will  have  nothing  but  freehold  se- 
curity. The  real  estate  agent, 
being  in  great  need  of  the  money, 
gives  his  property  for  security,  and 
secures  the  loan.  He  immediately 
pays  it  out  to  a  groceryman  on  a 
note  over-due.  The  groceryman, 
having  no  need  of  the  money,  de- 
posits it  in  the  same  bank.  The 
bank  now  owes  the  business  man 
one  thousand  dollars,  and  the 
groceryman  seven  hundred  dollars, 
making  seventeen  hundred  dollars, 
one-fourth  of  which  amount,  $425, 
has  to  be  kept  as  a  Government 
reserve  fund,  leaving  just  $575 
with  which  to  pay  the  $1700  now 
due  the  depositors.  Thus  bankers 
devise  cunning  schemes  to  fasten 
the  responsibility  on  the  bank  pa- 
trons to  their  securities,  and,  like 
Samson,  pulled  the  pillars  from 
under  the  Temple,  until  all  is  re- 
duced to  a  mass  of  ruins. 

All  of  these  securities  are  lost, 
and  are  bought  up  by  the  banking 
fraternity,  who  own  and  control  all 


—    22  — 


the  money  in  the  country,  and  who 
shrink  all  of  the  property  and  se- 
curity within  their  narrow  limits. 
On  February  15,  1890,  The  Econo- 
mist published  a  detailed  statement 
of  the  affairs  of  eleven  joint  stock 
banks  in  London  to  December  31, 
1889,  showing  that  the  total  net 
wordly  possessions  of  these  banks 
in  capital  and  surplus  are  $95,062,- 
858,  with  $80,096,723  of  this,  or 
within  $15,524,000  of  the  whole 
possession,  on  hand  in  the  Bank  of 
Kngland,  with  investment  of 
$688,764,589. 

Henry  Carey  Baird  remarks:  "A 
pretty  lively  style  of  business,  this 
drawing  revenue  in  one  mode  or 
another  on  $688,764,569,  for  $15,- 
524,000  actually  out  of  their  pos- 
session and  control,  or  on  $672,- 
240,000  for  the  use  of  their  credit 
alone.  None  of  the  banks  claim 
that  they  can  meet  their  obliga- 
tions to  their  depositors,  not  even 
at  the  ratio  of  one  to  three;  they 
only  rely  upon  their  depositors' 
confidence  in  them  to  do  it. 

The  Bank  of  England's  credit  is 
$20  of  credit  to  $i  of  value.  All 
property  or  bonds  purchased  in 
America  is  done  by  English  syndi- 
cates, who  give  a  draft  upon  the 
Bank  of  England  for  payment. 
The  draft  is  never  cashed  at  the 
bank,  but  everything  is  adjusted 
by  the  maturities  of  these  securi- 
ties and  their  interests  and  rents 
due  them  from  Americans. 


They  have  ten  billion  dollars  in 
bonds,  lands,  and  other  securities, 
and  every  year  they  draw  off  from 
our  productive  industry  four  hun- 
dred and  eighty-six  millions  of 
dollars.  As  the  securities  and 
interest  have  matured,  they  have 
been  re-investing  it,  until  within 
the  last  two  years.  Now  it  is 
going  over  to  England.  In  1893 
ninety-five  millions  of  gold  was 
shipped  out  of  the  country,  and  up 
to  July  of  1894  about  fifty  millions 
had  followed  it. 

The  balance  of  trade  has  nothing 
whatever  to  do  with  our  shipment 
of  Gold  to  Europe.  It  is  simply 
the  maturity  of  interests,  rents,  and 
other  various  ways  they  have  of 
fleecing  the  American  suckers,  that 
enable  them  to  pass  out  our  gold  to 
old  England.  Our  bankers  are  but 
the  puppets  and  mouthpieces  of 
the  Bank  of  England.  They  rule 
the  American  bankers  with  a  rod  of 
iron,  and  if  they  refuse  to  obey 
their  dictates  will  crush  them  like 
they  would  an  egg-shell.  The  in- 
fernal manipulation  of  our  cur- 
rency, the  National  Bank,  the  crea- 
tion of  our  bonded  debt  by  the 
destroying  of  our  currency,  all  had 
their  origin  in  the  Bank  of  Eng- 
land. Through  their  dictation,  our 
Congress  adopted  the  gold  standard, 
and  England  now  can,  through 
the  maturity  of  her  securities, 
rents  and  interest,  here  all  payable 


in  gold  coin,  draw  off  every  dollar 
of  gold  within  six  months,  and 
bankrupt  the  whole  nation  through 
it.  The  latest  statistics  show  that 
there  is  only  five  hundred  and  nine- 
teen millions  of  gold  in  the  country. 
We  have,  with  all  our  currency,  in- 
cluding gold  and  silver,  about  one 
dollar  of  currency  to  pay  eighty 
dollars  of  debt,  and  most  of  it  is 
payable  in  gold  coin.  If  the  tariff 
fools  will  only  show  the  voters  how 
the  tariff  will  enable  them  to  pay 
eighty  dollars  of  debt  with  one  dol- 
lar of  money,  they  will  earn  the 
lasting  gratitude  of  the  American 
people. 

When  money  stringency  is  cre- 
ated by  these  banking  institutions, 
millions  of  the  homes  of  the  poor 
and  worthy  of  the  land,  for  which 
they  have  toiled  the  greater  part 
of  their  lives,  are  thus  stolen 
from  them  by  high-handed  land 
pirates,  through  legalized  rob- 
bery and  gambling  methods. 
After  having  their  harvest  they 
let  out  the  money  again  and  set 
the  wage  slave  to  work  for  eight  or 
ten  years,  when  they  attack  him 
again  with  similar  results.  Each 
time  the  crop  is  slimmer,  and  soon 
everything  will  pass  into  the  hands 
of  these  giant  robbers. 

Thirty-one  thousand  persons  own 
one-half  of  the  property  of  the 
United  States,  and  the  other  half  is 
going  over  to  them  at  the  rate  of 


two  thousand  millions  a  year.  It 
requires  twenty-five  thousand  wage 
slaves,  working  three  hundred  days 
in  the  year,  to  keep  up  Vander- 
bilt's  income. 

The  whole  question  of  debt 
comes  through  the  interest  upon 
the  currency.  It  is  a  tax  upon  that 
which  is  possessed  of  no  intrinsic 
value,  and  which  should  be  fur- 
nished to  the  people  by  the  Gov- 
ernment as  free  as  the  air  we 
breathe..  The  Revolutionary  fath- 
ers rebelled  against  the  mother 
country  because  of  a  tax  upon  mer- 
chandise, but  now  their  descend- 
ants pay  to  the  same  people, 
through  their  banking  methods  in- 
troduced here,  a  tax  of  ten  cents 
upon  every  dollar  they  use,  and 
which  costs  not  over  a  fraction  of 
a  cent  to  make.  The  spirit  of  '76 
has  departed  from  the  generation , 
and  the  American  is  a  slave  to  his 
oppressor.  England  holds  to-day 
in  this  nation  over  ten  thousand 
millions  worth  of  property  wealth 
and  securities,  and  yet  she  never 
crossed  a  bayonet,  or  gave  for  this 
great  wealth  one  day  of  productive 
labor,  but  wrested  it  from  us  by  her 
thieving  banking  system  of  usury 
and  credit.  She  owns  all  of  the 
gold  in  the  world,  and  seventy  per 
cent,  of  all  the  bonds,  yet  she 
never  dug  up  one  pound  of  gold  in 
her  isle  or  did  a  day's  work  for  the 
bonds.  The  monopoly  of  the  cur- 


—  24  — 


rency  and  interest  system  will  kill 
any  nation.  Every  nation  must 
have  some  medium  of  exchange, 
and  when  tax  upon  such  medium 
of  exchange  exceeds  the  productive 
powers  of  the  nation  its  death  knell 
has  been  rung. 

Congressman  Walker,  of  Massa- 
chusetts, a  strong  Republican,  puts 
the  public  and  private  debts  of  the 
United  States  at  thirty-two  billions. 
Frederick  C.  Waite  (Republican) 
Special  Agent  of  the  Census  Bu- 
reau, says  in  77ie  National  Spec- 
tator that  the  total  private  indebt- 
edness of  the  American  people  in 
1880  was  only  $8,750,000,000.  In 
September,  1892,  it  was  $19,700,- 
000,000,  an  increase  of  thirteen 
billions  in  twelve  years,  in  private 
indebtedness  alone. 

It  requires  two  thousand  millions 
of  dollars  to  pay  the  annual  inter- 
est upon  the  public  and  private 
debts  of  the  United  States,  being 
one  thousand  millions  beyond  the 
dead  lines  of  our  annual  increase 
of  wealth,  and  there  is  not  over  one 
billion  dollars  of  currency  with 
which  to  pay  it,  allowing  nothing 
for  the  payment  of  taxes,  or  for 
business  purposes.  Is  it  any  won- 
der that  wrecks  strew  the  land,  that 
business  is  prostrated,  and  that 
millions  are  out  of  employment? 
Nor  is  there  the  slightest  prospect 
that  business  will  improve.  It 
must  continue  to  grow  worse  until 


there  shall  be  a  revolution  in  affairs 
of  government.  Money  is  so  dear, 
and  the  means  of  investment  so 
limited  that  no  one  can  hope  for  a 
living,  and  pay  such  extortionate 
interest  upon  money. 

TARIFF. 

Nothing  can  be  more  grotesque 
or  supremely  ridiculous  to  see, 
gathered  around  the  prostrate  form 
of  the  nation  in  its  death  struggle, 
than  these  two  old  Democratic  and 
Republican  quack  law-doctors 
dosing,  experimenting,  and  doing 
up  the  dying  patient  with  their 
hundred-year-old  patent  nostrum 
tariff  remedy,  that  never  has  ef- 
fected a  single  cure  in  all  its  his- 
tory ;  quarreling  with  each  other 
only  as  to  the  amount  of  tariff  dose 
to  be  administered,  while  with  each 
dose  the  pulse  becomes  more  feeble, 
and  fainter  glows  the  spark  of  life. 
It  reminds  one  of  the  story  told  by 
Lincoln  of  an  old  farmer  who  went 
gunning  with  his  boy,  and,  seeing 
as  he  thought,  a  squirrel  running 
along  on  a  rail  fence  blazed  away 
at  it  several  times  without  any  ap- 
parent effect.  The  boy,  seeing  no 
game  on  the  fence,  was  astonished 
by  such  acts,  and,  looking  for  some 
explanation  of  it,  soon  found  it  out, 
and  told  the  old  man  that  it  was 
only  a  louse  running  on  his  eye- 
brow. The  nation  is  not  afflicted 
with  the  tariff  disease,  but  is  being 


—  25  — 


devoured  by  such  vermin  as 
the  bankers,  bondholders,  money- 
sharks,  trusts  and  monopolies. 
These  vermin  have  so  beclouded 
the  vision  of  these  old  parties  with 
boodle  that  they  can  distinguish 
no  difference  between  a  louse  and 
the  tariff  question. 

The  question  of  tariff  is  one  of 
the  most  deceptive  ever  brought 
forward  for  public  discussion,  and 
out  of  which  the  politicians  have 
made  more  capital,  wrought  more 
mischief  and  beggared  the  country 
through  their  discussion  of  it  than 
by  any  other  means. 

The  Republican  party  advocates 
that  the  people  of  this  nation 
should  manufacture  their  own  arti- 
cles and  goods,  and  patronize  home 
industry,  not  depending  on  or  pur- 
chasing such  products  from  other 
nations.  To  make  this  effective, 
and  to  enable  our  manufactories  to 
be  so  sustaining,  they  advocate  a 
high  tariff  upon  all  foreign  pro- 
ducts, in  order  to  shut  out  competi- 
tion. The  Democratic  party  holds 
similar  views,  but  advocates  a 
lower  schedule  of  rates.  When  the 
tariff  question  was  first  discussed, 
the  cry  was  to  protect  labor  ;  now 
the  cry  is  to  protect  our  manufact- 
urers, which  is  the  right  way  of 
putting  it. 

It  will  be  observed  that  while 
the  protectionist  cries  out  "Pro- 
tection to  American  industries,"  he 


takes  every  advantage  he  can  to 
place  his  goods  upon  the  free  mar- 
kets of  other  countries,  and  destroy 
their  industries.  When  France  and 
Germany  put  a  tariff  tax  upon  the 
American  hog,  a  squeal  went  up 
from  the  swinish  nature  of  these 
protectionists  that  was  heartrend- 
ing. Their  nature  will  exult  over 
a  famine  in  Russia,  where  thou- 
sands starve,  or  will  chuckle  with 
glee  when  some  terrible  war  breaks 
out,  that  will  advance  the  price  of 
their  goods.  This  is  the  hog  na- 
ture: Get  all,  and  take  all,  but  give 
back  nothing.  Self-preservation 
does  not  require  it.  Neither  is 
there  a  particle  of  justice  about  it. 
Right  demands  that  America  ex- 
tends to  other  nations  the  same 
privileges  and  civilities  that  are  ex- 
tended to  her  by  them,  and  if  she 
is  unwilling  to  do  so,  then  let  her 
keep  at  home. 

In  what  respect  are  the  working 
people  of  America  protected  by  a 
high  or  low  tariff?  We  grant  that 
the  articles  manufactured  are  well 
protected,  for  within  the  last  thirty- 
two  years  a  crop  of  millions  has 
been  harvested  from  manufacturing 
interests,  while  the  wage  slave  who 
produces  the  article  is  left  helpless 
and  unprotected.  Observe  the  his- 
tory of  the  manufacturer  of  the  na- 
tion ;  it  is  only  a  history  of  sav- 
agery and  oppression  toward  the 
wage  slave.  He  has  forced  upon 


—  26    — 


him  piece  work,  and  continually 
cuts  down  the  price  as  soon  as  he 
come  up  to  a  fair,  living  figure, 
thereby  forcing  him  to  do  the  work 
of  three  days  in  one,  with  only  a 
small  pittance  for  such  a  day's 
work,  while  the  price  of  the  article 
remains  the  same. 

The  manufacturer  has  to  be  pro- 
tected against  foreign  manufacture, 
but  he  must  have  his  wage  slave 
come  into  unprotected  competition 
with  the  free  trade  labor  market  of 
the  world,  to  enhance  the  profits  of 
the  employer.  Nor  can  it  be 
shown  where  any  of  these  men 
give  protection  to  American  labor 
to  the  extent  of  one  cent  per  day, 
if  foreign  labor  underbids  Ameri- 
can citizens,  who  are  being  displaced 
by  the  worst  class  of  immigrants 
from  Asia  and  other  countries, 
brought  over  here  by  the  manu- 
facturing and  capitalistic  classes, 
to  strike  down  the  workingmen  of 
America. 

The  undesirable  immigration  of 
persons  totally  incapable  of  citizen- 
ship, means  the  displacement  of  a 
like  number  of  American  work- 
men, and,  by  free  trade  in  labor, 
forcing  them  down  to  the  lower 
level  of  barbarism,  while  the  pro- 
tected capitalist  and  manufacturer 
smilingly  doubles  up  his  profits. 

When  the  McKinley  bill  was 
enacted,  with  its  increased  tariff 
revenue,  giving  to  manufacturers 


increased  profits,  there  was  imme- 
diately inaugurated  a  systematic 
cutting  of  wages,  and  all  through 
the  land  there  were  more  strikes 
against  the  cutting  down  of  wages 
than  there  was  ever  known  before. 
No  better  proof  can  be  had,  to 
hurl  the  lie  back  into  the  teeth  of 
tariff  imbeciles,  than  to  take  the 
reports  of  McKinley 's  own  State  : 
(iThe  Ohio  State  Board  of  Chari- 
ties give  the  number  of  persons  in 
the  State  every  year  who  are  sup- 
ported wholly  or  in  part  by  public 
taxation.  The  following  is  a  state- 
ment of  the  aggregate  for  three 
years  under  Republican  good  times 
— Harrison's  administration: 

"  1890  :  No.  of  persons,  97,910  ;  cost,  $3,166,778.88 
1891  :  No.  of  persons,  115,614  ;  0031,13,254,301.52 
1892 ;  No.  of  persons,  154,426  ;  cost,  $3,959,704.39 

The  cost  for  the  three  years  being 
$10,380,784.79." 

The  population  of  Ohio,  accord- 
ing to  the  census  of  1890,  was 
3,672,316.  This,  for  the  year, 
gives  one  in  thirty- seven  and  one- 
half  of  the  entire  population  of  the 
State,  supported  wholly  or  in  part 
by  public  taxation  by  the  people 
within  the  State. 

That  in  one  of  the  most  favor- 
able States  of  the  Union  56,516 
paupers  are  bred  within  the  short 
space  of  two  years,  costing  the 
State  $7,929,255.51  under  a  Repub- 
lican form  of  Government,  speaks 
more  than  volumes  concerning  a 


rule  that  is  honeycombed  with  rot- 
tenness. 

No  more  gross  insult  can  be 
given  to  the  intelligence  of  men 
than  to  ask  them  to  accept  the 
tariff  question  as  a  solution  of  the 
problems  which  have  been  growing 
rapidly  worse  each  year  under  it, 
and  which  all  facts  and  experience 
refute. 

"  In  1890,  in  New  York  City, 
23,000  tenants  were  ejected  under 
Harrison's  administration,  while 
only  5,000  were  ejected  in  the  whole 
of  Ireland  in  the  same  year." — 
Arena  foot  note. 

The  wage  slave  not  only  finds  his 
labor  unprotected,  but  when  he 
buys  goods  is  forced  to  buy  in  a 
protected  market  at  monopoly 
prices.  The  whole  country  is  full 
of  corporate  monopolies,  trusts  and 
syndicates,  which  pursue  him  like 
a  bloodhound  while  he  lives,  and 
after  his  death  these  vampires  have 
a  corner  on  the  coffin  and  grave  in 
which  he  is  buried.  This  talk  of 
protection  to  the  wage  slave  or 
farmer  is  "fatiguing  in  the  ex- 
treme." 

The  women  and  girls  of  America 
can  wear  their  lives  out  in  sweating 
establishments,  making  shirts  at 
seven  cents  apiece,  while  the 
heathen  Chinaman  has  only  to 
wash  and  spit  on  it  to  get  ten 
cents. 

In  the  Senate  one  of  the  Senators, 


greatly  interested  in  protecting  the 
raisin  industry  of  the  country,  se- 
cured some  California  raisins  at  the 
stores  in  Washington,  paying  fif- 
teen, twenty  and  thirty  cents  per 
pound,  and  which  had  been  pur- 
chased of  the  farmer  for  four  and 
one-half  cents  per  pound.  This  is 
the  key-note  to  all  of  the  tariff 
question  and  shows  just  who  is 
protected  by  it. 

The  farmer  who  produces  the 
raisin  has,  ninety-nine  times  out 
of  a  hundred,  a  mortgage  on  his 
farm  on  which  he  is  paying  10 
or  12  per  cent,  interest.  He  is 
obliged  to  secure  a  further  loan  at 
1 8  or  24  per  cent,  to  pay  other 
expenses  and  to  harvest  his  crop. 
On  him  is  all  of  the  care,  anxiety 
and  work  of  producing  the  crop. 
He  is  up  early  and  late,  and  works 
all  the  year  through,  in  all  kinds 
of  weather.  His  interest  must  be 
paid  and  his  bills  met.  He  receives 
for  all  his  work  and  trouble,  the 
Senator  states,  four  and  one-half 
cents  per  pound  for  his  crops,  while 
according  to  this  same  Senator's 
statement,  he  paid  an  average  price 
in  the  store  in  Washington,  within 
a  fraction  of  a  cent  five  times  more 
per  pound  than  the  farmer  was  paid 
for  them.  If  there  is  not  something 
rotten  in  this  Denmark,  then  there 
never  was  anything  rotten.  The 
farmer  who  did  all  the  work  and 
had  all  the  care  of  producing  them 


—  28  — 


was  paid  less  than  one-third  of 
what  they  were  sold  for  to  the 
public  at  their  cheapest  rates.  If 
our  Congressmen  would  give  some 
attention  to  ferreting  out  such  rob- 
bers as  the  bankers,  transportation 
companies,  corporations,  monop- 
olies, wholesalers,  produce  men, 
trusts  and  speculators,  who  prey 
upon  everything  that  is  produced, 
from  its  very  beginning  till  it  gets 
to  the  consumer,  at  a  profit  to  them 
varying  from  one  hundred  to  ten 
hundred  per  cent.,  they  would  be 
doing  something  of  practical  bene- 
fit to  the  country. 

These  would-be  legislators  are 
but  base  hirelings,  paid  by  assas- 
sins and  robbers  to  legalize  crime, 
and  then  keep  their  hands  off  while 
others  plunder  and  destroy  the 
people. 

In  government  ownership  of  the 
railroads  the  raisins  would  not  cost 
for  transportation  in  excess  of  one- 
half  cent  per  pound.  They  could 
then  be  delivered  direct  to  the  con- 
sumer at  a  cost  of  one  cent  per 
pound.  We  could  then  well  afford 
to  pay  the  farmer  five  and  one-half 
cents  more,  making  ten  cents  per 
pound  for  the  raisins,  and  the 
public  would  be  benefited  by  the 
reduction  on  the  average  price  of 
nine  and  two-third  cents  per  pound. 

Destroy  all  the  robbers  between 
the  producer  and  the  consumer  and 
we  will  destroy  all  necessity  for 


tariff  legislation  or  tinkering  with 
the  tariff. 

For  wool  the  farmer  gets  five 
cents  per  pound,  or  $25  for  his  en- 
tire output  of  six  hundred  pounds. 
When  this  passes  through  the  man- 
ufacturers' hands  he  adds,  besides 
his  large  margin  of  profits  and  inter- 
est, 42  cents  for  protected  tariff  rates. 
It  then  goes  to  the  wholesaler  and 
retailer,  who  put  their  profits  and 
interests  upon  it.  The  tailor,  a 
competitive  slave,  secures  it  from 
the  retailer,  partly  on  credit,  and 
makes  it  into  a  common  business 
suit  weighing  six  pounds,  and  sells 
it  to  the  farmer  for  $25  which  he 
got  for  his  six  hundred  pounds  of 
wool.  The  farmer  just  realized  one 
pound  of  manufactured  goods  for 
each  hundred  pounds  of  wool.  The 
competitive  slave,  after  paying  the 
cost  of  all  materials,  had  six  dollars 
for  his  work. 

We  will  allow  that  there  are  four 
pounds  of  woolen  goods,  and  two 
of  other  material  in  the  suit.  The 
manufacturer  would  not  require 
over  eight  pounds  of  the  raw  mate- 
rial all  told  to  make  four  pounds 
of  cloth,  which  would  cost  him 
forty  cents.  The  other  material 
before  manufactured  would  not  ex- 
ceed $i  for  the  two  pounds. 

Thus  we  see  that  after  the  wool 
left  the  farmer's  hands  and  the 
hands  of  others  who  sold  raw 
material  which  contributed  to  the 


—  29  — 


suit,  there  was  left  for  the  manu- 
facturer and  go-between  $17.60  to 
divide  up  as  profits,  deducting  the 
small  amount  required  for  manu- 
facturing it. 

The  introduction  of  labor-saving 
machines  throw  out  of  employ- 
ment multitudes  of  men  and  wom- 
en, and  only  adds  another  curse 
to  labor.  These  heaven-born  mes- 
sengers for  oppressed  labor  have 
been  captured  by  corporations  and 
companies,  which,  through  their 
trusts  and  syndicates,  they  main- 
tain and  govern  the  price  of  their 
output,  so  that  the  laborer  has  no 
share  in  their  profits,  nor  are  his 
hours  of  labor  reduced  by  them. 

One  quarter  of  the  labor  of  the 
United  States  has  been  displaced 
by  them  within  the  last  thirty  years. 
Neither  do  the  new  arts  and  in- 
dustries that  are  being  created 
afford  any  real  relief.  The  ques- 
tion of  tariff  directs  the  attention 
from  the  real  issues,  and  means 
protection  to  the  non-producing 
robber  who  is  plundering  and  de- 
stroying the  producer. 

Statistics  show  that  four  out  of 
every  five  of  the  population  live 
outside  of  our  cities  and  the  most 
of  them  are  engaged  in  agricultural 
pursuits.  It  must  then  necessa- 
rily follow  that  four-fifths  of  the 
demands  for  the  products  of  our 
manufactories  and  varied  industries 
of  our  cities  comes  from  this  class, 


and  that  whatever  tends  to  cripple 
their  industries  reacts  directly  upon 
our  cities. 

By  the  contraction  of  the  currency 
and  the  demonetization  of  silver, 
money  has  become  so  enhanced  in 
value  that  it  now  takes  just  twice 
the  amount  of  farm  products  to 
buy  a  dollar  with  which  to  pay 
interest  on  a  mortgage  or  cancel  a 
debt  as  it  would  have  done  when 
the  debt  was  made.  In  other  words, 
the  debts  have  increased  to  double 
their  amount,  although  the  amount 
of  money  stipulated  is  the  same. 

Transportation  companies,  prod- 
uce men,  speculators,  taxes  tor  the 
legislation  of  boodlers,  all  come  in 
for  their  share  of  products. 

When  the  yearly  clean-up  is 
made,  the  farmer,  instead  of  find- 
ing he  is  one  or  two  thousand  dol- 
lars ahead  for  the  year's  work,  is 
dismayed  to  find  that  he  is  that 
amount  in  debt;  and,  failing  to 
meet  his  interest  upon  his  mort- 
gages, or  to  cancel  his  debts,  he  is 
sold  out,  and  the  farm  is  passed 
into  the  hands  of  a  tenant. 

There  must  first  be  a  demand 
for  manufactured  goods  before  any 
will  be  produced,  and  that  demand 
must  come  from  the  first  producer, 
and  when  he  fails,  we  must  all  fail 
with  him. 

Corrupt  legislation  has  killed  the 
goose  that  laid  the  golden  egg.  If 
the  farmers  had  not  been  struck 


—  30  — 


down  so  unmercifully,  they  would 
have  devoted  their  surplus  to  the 
improvement  of  their  farms.  New 
houses  would  have  been  built,  de- 
mands made  upon  our  manufactures 
and  cities  for  clothing,  furniture, 
carpets,  harness,  and  a  hundred 
and  one  articles  necessary  to  civil- 
ized beings.  Now  all  of  his  labor 
and  products  go  to  feed  such  ver- 
min as  the  bankers,  money  sharks 
and  others  who  never  did  a  stroke 
of  work  for  what  they  wrest  from 
him  through  the  robbing  process  of 
law.  The  tenant  farmer  who  soon 
takes  his  place  lives  like  a  heathen, 
cares  nothing  for  the  comforts  and 
conveniences  of  civilization,  and 
makes  little  or  no  demand  for  the 
products  of  the  manufactories  of 
our  cities. 

The  unkindest  cut  of  all  is  to 
hear  these  vermin  who  have  grown 
slick  and  fat  on  what  they  have 
robbed  from  others,  tell  us  that  the 
farmers  and  working  classes  have 
been  living  too  fast,  and  they  must 
not  expect  anything  but  the  bare 
necessities  of  life. 

Take  the  record  of  these  beastly 
vermin;  it  is  one  of  rot,  riot  and 
licentiousness;  eaten  up  with  dis- 
ease, they  care  no  more  for  human 
life  or  the  happiness  of  others  than 
they  do  for  that  of  a  rat.  When- 
ever human  kind  strive  to  develop 
or  bring  out  their  inborn,  God- 
endowed  qualities  of  the  human 


mind  and  soul,  they  snuff  it  out 
with  their  money  power,  and  force 
us  down  to  the  level  of  the  brute 
creation  with  their  iron  heel  of  des- 
potism. 

Repeal  the  charter  of  the  national 
banks,  re-enact  the  free  coinage  of 
silver  at  the  rate  of  16  to  i,  estab- 
lish government  postal  banks,  then 
print  three  billions  of  green-backs, 
and  let  them  out  to  the  farmers  or 
others  who  have  property  for  secu- 
rity at  one  per  cent,  per  annum,  and 
we  will  have  within  one  year  the 
most  prosperous  time  that  has  ever 
been  known  in  all  the  history  of  the 
world.  Then  add  to  this  the  own- 
ership and  control  of  all  natural 
monopolies  by  the  government,  and 
within  ten  years  we  will  advance 
more  in  the  solution  of  the  problem 
of  government  than  has  been  done 
in  all  the  history  of  the  govern- 
ments. 

With  money  at  one  per  cent,  to 
effect  an  exchange  of  value,  and 
that  being  paid  to  ourselves  (gov- 
ernment), we  could  sweep  the  com- 
merce of  every  nation  from  the  seas 
and  lay  our  produce  and  manufac- 
tured goods  in  every  port  of  the 
world,  and  swing  wide  open  our 
nation's  gates  for  the  world's  free 
exchanges.  For  exchanges  we  now 
have  to  pay  ten  cents  tor  the  use 
of  every  dollar  with  which  to  make 
such  exchange.  Capitalists  in  Eng- 
land secure  money  at  three  per 


—  3r  — 


cent,  with  which  they  build  ships 
to  carry  on  the  commerce  of  the 
world.  Their  annual  net  earnings 
are  six  per  cent,  on  the  capital 
invested.  They  pay  three  per  cent, 
of  it  on  borrowed  capital,  and  de- 
clare a  dividend  of  three  per  cent. 
American  capitalists  build  ships  to 
compete  for  the  world's  commerce 
at  one  quarter  more  expense  occa- 
sioned by  paying  monopoly  prices 
for  material  and  dear  money.  At 
the  close  of  the  first  year's  trade, 
they  have  realized  six  per  cent.,  the 
same  as  their  English  competitors, 
on  the  money  invested,  leaving 
them  one  per  cent,  in  debt,  which 
they  borrow  of  England.  In  a  few 
years  England  owns  all  of  the  ships 
and  has  run  out  her  American  com- 
petitor. What  applies  to  ships  ap- 
plies equally  to  manufactures. 

Money  at  one  per  cent,  put  into 
our  manufactures  would  not  only 
mean  to  supply  our  home  markets, 
but  to  supply  the  world  with  prod- 
ucts. 

What  the  American  people  de- 
mand and  must  have  is  a  legal  dol- 
lar of  no  intrinsic  value  to  make 
the  exchange  with,  handed  directly 
to  them  by  the  government,  with  no 
Shylock's  or  banker's  tax  upon  it. 

The  protection  the  American 
people  must  have  is  in  their  God- 
given  right  to  hold  and  possess 
that  which  they  produce,  and  he  is 
a  thief  and  robber  who  wrests  from 


them  such  right.  The  only  condi- 
that  God  Almighty  imposed  upon 
mankind  for  his  existence  was  that 
he  earn  his  bread  by  the  sweat  of 
his  brow.  These  human  vermin, 
who  have  always  preyed  upon  hu- 
manity, must  get  away  from  us, 
and  earn  their  title  to  an  existence, 
for  if  they  do  not  we  shall  exter- 
minate them  just  as  we  do  other 
vermin.  There  is  nothing  that 
people  so  loathe  and  abhor  as  ver- 
min, for  they  have  a  filthy  way  of 
getting  a  living.  Yet  the  world  is 
full  of  the  same  type  in  human 
form,  and  the  time  is  not  far  dis- 
tant when  they  will  be  held  in  as 
much  abhorrence  as  the  insect  that 
crawls  and  feeds  upon  the  human 
race. 

That  free  trade  between  nations 
or  individuals  pauperizes  either  is 
a  lie  black  as  hell.  If  a  citizen  of 
the  United  States  produces  one 
hundred  dollars  of  wealth  and  ex- 
changes it  with  a  citizen  of  Eng- 
land for  the  same  amount  of  wealth 
produced  there,  it  is  the  grossest  of 
absurdities  to  suppose  that  either 
country  is  impoverished  by  the 
trade.  If  the  Englishman  is  more 
shrewd  than  the  American  and  gets 
the  better,  of  the  trade,  England 
has  been  enriched  at  our  expense, 
but  the  same  holds  good  of  Amer- 
ica if  he  beats  the  Englishman  in 
the  trade.  Under  a  good  condition 
of  government  no  wealth  would  go 


out  of  our  country,  except  as  a 
gift,  unless  it  would  bring  back  a 
good  return. 

If  what  they  call  the  balance  of 
trade  is  against  us,  it  can  only 
come  by  the  individuals  of  a  nation 
getting  the  better  of  our  citizens  in 
a  trade,  or  it  may  come  as  it  does 
to-day  by  the  infernal  foreign  bank 
methods  of  levying  a  tax  upon  our 
currency  and  the  extension  of  the 
credit  system  that  robs  us  of  our 
wealth  and  land,  and  that  draws 
revenues  from  us  in  interest  and 
rents. 

They  not  only  say  to  the  citizens 
of  other  nations,  we  shall  not  allow 
you  to  have  free  trade  with  our 
citizens,  but  we  do  not  intend  that 
our  citizens  shall  have  any  free 
trade  with  each  other.  We  have 
already  shown  that  the  mission 
of  money  is  to  facilitate  trade 
in  the  free  exchange  of  values  pos- 
sessed with  only  a  legal  value.  To 
prevent  free  trade  in  the  wealth 
the  citizens  of  this  nation  produce, 
both  parties  have  been  accomplices 
to  the  crime  of  taking  up  our  un- 
taxed  currency  (greenbacks),  burn- 
ing it  up  and  then  giving  out  in  its 
place  bank  notes  on  untaxed  in- 
terest paying  a  banker's  debt,  so 
that  he  can  live  on  the  interest  of 
what  he  owes  the  people. 

All  hail  !  Live  forever  !  Blessed 
be  thou  of  the  vermin  tribe.  Live 
on  the  sweat  of  the  poor  man's 


brow,  the  washwoman's  sighs,  and 
the  widow's  tears.  All  power  is 
given  into  your  hands.  Allow  no 
free  trade  between  any  citizens  ; 
put  your  grinding  tariff  of  ten 
cents  upon  every  dollar  of  wealth, 
or  deny  them  the  right  of  free 
trade,  and  send  them  back  to  bar- 
barism. Take  everything  in  sight; 
let  the  wail  of  despair  be  heard  in 
all  the  land,  and  the  pinched  and 
starved  forms  of  children  fill  the 
streets.  We  will  stifle  them  with 
the  cry  of  tariff  or  tariff  reform, 
and  upon  their  ruins  build  aris 
tocracy,  plutocracy  and  monarchy. 

NEWSPAPERS. 

America's  greatest  enemy  is  the 
foul  carrion  bird  called  the  daily 
press,  which  lives  upon  the  offal 
and  filth  of  the  nation.  These 
dirty  carrion  birds,  with  keen 
scent  for  what  is  rotten,  and  a 
greedy  appetite  for  filth,  collect 
around  the  foul  cesspools  of  immoral 
lives.  Together  they  throw  in  the 
drag-nets  and  draw  out  from  its 
slimy  depths. 

The  more  of  filth  and  stench  it 
has  the  sweeter  the  morsel  is  to 
their  appetites.  After  having 
glutted  their  appetites,  they  now 
prepare  to  serve  their  separate 
dishes  of  scandal  in  high  life, 
adultery,  incest,  robbery,  murder, 
lynching  of  negroes,  the  slums  of 
New  York  and  Chinatown,  cow- 


-33  — 


boys,  faro  games,  fiendish  deeds  of 
a  negro,  etc.  Saintly  papers  ! 
surely  such  dishes  as  these  are  fit 
for  the  gods,  and  must  purify  the 
lives  of  all — more  especially  the 
boys  and  girls  of  the  coming  gen- 
eration, and  lifts  them  up  to  a 
higher  civilization. 

These  low  carrion  buzzards  when 
confronted  with  such  facts  excuse 
themselves  by  saying  they  only 
give  what  the  public  demands, 
when  they  know  that  it  is  the  out- 
flow of  their  own  rotten  natures. 
Steeped  as  they  are  with  immoral- 
ity and  vice,  they  have  not  the 
faintest  conception  that  other  peo- 
ple's natures  are  different,  so  they 
give  to  the  public  what  delights 
themselves. 

On  every  page  there  is  some- 
thing to  feed  or  appeal  to  the  base 
nature  of  man,  instead  of  trying  to 
improve  him  by  good,  wholesome, 
practical  knowledge.  It  matters 
not  how  pure  a  nation  may  be,  if 
they  have  dished  up  to  them  day 
after  day,  year  in  and  year  out, 
these  putrid  dishes,  soused  over 
with  the  most  sickening  details,  its 
morals  will  be  surely  subjugated 
and  destroyed.  No  people  can  con- 
tinue pure  when  such  a  mess  of 
sewerage  is  poured  upon  them 
from  such  low  sources. 

Their  word-pictures  of  obscenity 
and  vileness  are  more  degrading 
and  contaminating  than  any  pict- 


ures that  ever  appeared  either  in 
the  Police  Gazette  or  Police  News. 
They  invade  the  sanctity  of  home 
life,  and  detail  to  the  public  all  the 
private  affairs  of  innocent  people. 
If  a  member  of  a  family  has  dis- 
graced himself,  they  must  drag 
all  of  his  family  and  relatives  be- 
fore the  public  and  present  their 
past  records.  If  the  facts  are  not 
sensational  enough,  they  draw 
upon  their  subtle  brains  to  supply 
the  shortcomings.  The  effect  is 
overpowering  when  these  foun- 
tains, charged  with  impurities,  ex- 
hort upon  morals  and  bemoan  the 
sad  departure  therefrom. 

In  their  editorials  they  preach 
against  the  evils  of  pugilism,  while 
in  the  very  same  sheets  flaming 
accounts  are  given  of  the  coming 
fight  of  some  bruisers.  When 
such  fight  comes  off,  they  spend 
thousands  of  dollars  to  get  the  first 
and  most  sensational  news. 

The  murder  of  Addie  Gilmore, 
with  all  its  horrible  details,  as 
served  up  by  the  papers,  was  prob- 
ably brought  about  by  the  reading 
of  the  murderous  advertisements 
in  the  columns  of  the  daily  press. 
These  murderers  and  keepers  of 
brothels  still  advertise  their  trade 
in  the  columns  of  the  papers  under 
the  head  of  "Massage  Baths"  or 
"Manicure"  establishments. 

This  would  bring  the  blush  of 
shame  to  the  devil's  face,  but  not 


—  34  — 


so  to  the  faces  of  these  editors. 
£>uch  papers  are  not  fit  to  be  read 
in  the  brothels  they  advertise.  The 
^very  atmosphere  is  polluted  by 
itheir  presence.  Yet,  as  a  flood, 
they  come  to  the  homes  of  the 
land,  and  their  influence  is  seen  in 
-the  terrible  pictures  they  present  to 
mis  of  the  life  of  to-day.  They  be- 
«come  base  hirelings  of  the  money 
power  and  corporate  greed. 

History  shows  that  there  is  noth- 
ing so  low  that  they  will  not  stoop 
4o.  The  most  iniquitous  measures 
=are  advocated  by  them  for  money 
^considerations.  They  keep  the 
-voters  in  ignorance  of  the  living 
Issues  of  the  day,  and  gorge  his 
^nind  with  depravity  and  vice, 
Awhile  the  enemy  steals  away  his 
iiome  and  life. 

To-day  we  hear  the  fierce  bark  of 
ithese  hell-hounds,  as  they  remorse- 
lessly pursue  the  bleeding  foot- 
prints of  our  robbed  and  starved 
Humanity,  wearily  pressing  their 
way  to  our  nation's  Capitol  to  ask, 
In  the  name  of  God  and  man,  to 
pity  them  in  their  afflictions  and 
extend  to  them  a  helping  hand  in 
their  terrible  struggle  for  life. 
"These  hell-born  monstrosities  pros- 
titute their  columns  to  sneer  and 
jest,  and  ridicule  this  wail  of  an- 
guish and  despair  that  comes  up 
rfrom  the  better  manhood  and 
\vomanhood  of  the  land. 


SCHOOLS   AND   COLLEGES. 

The  belief  that  our  forefathers 
indulged  in,  that  this  nation  would 
solve  the  difficult  problems  of  gov- 
ernment through  the  institution  of 
schools  and  colleges,  has  dissolved 
into  thin  air. 

The  curriculum  of  study  in  our 
colleges  has  no  more  relation  or 
practical  application  to  the  affairs 
of  life  than  the  tail  of  an  elephant 
has  to  the  direction  in  which  he  is 
to  go.  The  presidents  and  pro- 
fessors have  lectured,  theorized, 
and  taught  so  much  the  dead  lan- 
guages, higher  mathematics,  and 
ancient  history  that  the  moss  has 
grown  upon  their  backs.  Nothing 
but  the  blue  ether  or  ethereal  space 
can  engage  their  attention. 

They  have  hitched  their  char- 
iots to  a  star,  and  sail  in  the 
mystic  fields  of  other  worlds,  and 
cannot  be  contaminated  with  the 
grossness  of  this.  Ye  Gods !  They 
are  for  other  worlds,  and  im- 
perative duty  demands  that  we 
straighten  out  a  rainbow,  point  it 
skyward  and  then  slide  them  out 
on  their  ears  in  a  blaze  of  glory 
into  some  other  sphere.  Their  rant 
about  higher  education  is  all  bun- 
combe, for  the  more  we  get  of  it  the 
lower  our  civilization  becomes,  and 
just  in  the  proportion  that  we  in- 
crease our  daily  papers,  colleges 
and  churches,  we  lengthen  out  the 


—  35  — 


list  of  insane  people,  criminals  and 
paupers,  until  to-day  the  criminal 
list  exceeds  by  four-fold  the  in- 
crease of  population.  If  in  the 
future  they  add  no  more  check  to 
bad  government  than  they  have  in 
the  past,  we  will  have  to  look  else- 
where for  the  solution,  or  be 
snuffed  out  entirely. 

The  college  students,  when  they 
strike  earth,  are  hit  on  the  carnal 
side  of  their  nature.  They  pull 
their  mouths  askew  as  they  puff 
their  vile  opium  cigarettes,  and 
swell  out  with  great  pride  in  idiotic 
acts.  Sullivan  and  Corbett  are  the 
gods  they  worship ;  such  fill  their 
thoughts  by  day,  and  haunt  their 
dreams  by  night.  The  life  and 
character  of  Jesus  Christ  never 
enters  their  thoughts,  and  is  subject 
to  their  ridicule  and  jest. 

The  greatest  ambition  of  these 
educated  idiots  is  to  kick  the 
stuffing  out  of  a  football,  or  of  an 
idiot  like  themselves,  and  then 
have  their  pictures  in  the  papers, 
with  a  column  notice  of  their 
grand,  heroic  achievements  in  the 
interest  of  suffering  humanity,  for 
which  they  have  been  educated  at 
public  expense.  Their  highest 
grade  of  education  is  obtained 
when  they  can  give  a  whoop  iden- 
tical with  that  of  the  savage  In- 
dian. 

We  have  in  our  national  and 
public  life  to-day  the  out-put  of  our 


colleges,  and  there  is  not  one  in 
the  many  thousands  who  can  com- 
pare with  those  heroes  and  states- 
men who  lived  in  the  early  history 
of  our  country,  when  scarcely  any 
facilities  existed  for  educational 
purposes  except  the  common 
school. 

Benjamin  Franklin  and  Abraham 
Lincoln,  the  two  greatest  statesmen 
and  philosophers  that  America  ever 
produced,  were  educated  in  our 
public  schools,  and  never  saw  the 
inside  of  a  college.  Both  attracted 
the  attention  of  the  world  for  their 
profound  philosophy,  wisdom,  in- 
ventive genius,  patriotism  and 
statesmanship.  Franklin  towered 
like  a  giant  among  the  men  of  his 
time,  and  the  philosophers  of 
Europe  were  willing  to  do  obei- 
sance, and  learn  wisdom  at  his  feet. 
Lincoln  became  the  butt  for  the 
slurs  and  jeers  of  the  learned  pro- 
fessions. He  was  dubbed  rail- 
splitter,  backwoodsman  and  farmer, 
but  when  the  old  ship  of  state  was 
dismantled  and  stranded  on  the 
rocks  of  slavery  and  secession,  God 
Almighty  sent  this  rugged  pilot  to 
man  the  helm,  and,  through  the 
dark,  tempestuous  night,  brought 
the  old  ship  out  again  into  the  open 
sea.  His  genius  and  learning  has 
astonished  the  world.  His  speeches 
are  masterpieces  of  composition  and 
rhetoric,  and  Yale's  professor  fol- 
lowed him  in  his  lectures,  to  learn 


-36- 


of  the  art.  These  men  were  edu- 
cated about  things  of  earth  and  for 
the  earth.  They  were  brought  in 
daily  contact  with  its  sharp  corners 
and  the  stubborn  facts  of  life,  and 
sought  how  to  avoid  the  one  and 
solve  the  other. 

They  never  sailed  in  etherial 
space,  or  held  communion  with 
Greek  gods  ;  neither  did  they  frit- 
ter away  their  lives  in  the  study  of 
dead  languages.  They  lived  near 
to  humanity's  heart,  learned  there 
the  lessons  of  life,  and,  with  love 
born  of  God,  wrought  out  deliver- 
ances. 

Brains  are  at  a  discount  in  our 
colleges — big  pedal  extremities  at 
a  premium.  Upon  all  live  ques- 
tions of  the  day  they  trot  out  their 
old,  gray-headed  theories  and 
dogmas.  A  twentieth  century  idea 
could  not  be  shot  into  their  Silurian 
brains  with  a  cannon.  Nothing 
has  any  interest  to  them  unless  it 
has  to  them  an  ancient  smell,  like 
the  dead  languages. 

Upon  the  money  question  they 
give  us  the  old  gold-bug  rot  of  a 
gold  standard.  They  fiddle  upon 
redemption  of  coin,  when  any  driv- 
eling idiot  can  tell  them  that  all 
any  one  wants  of  money  is  to  have 
it  received,  passed  out  again,  and 
kept  going  on  its  mission  of  ex- 
change. Their  dwarfed  minds  hand 
out  to  us  the  solution  of  the  labor 
problem  in  competition  and  the 


right  adjustment  of  capital  and  la- 
bor. "You  can  all  come  to  our 
shores,"  they  shout  across  the 
ocean  to  all  Asiatics,  barbarians 
and  Scythians.  Their  solution  of 
the  whisky  business  is  to  protect 
and  license  crime,  get  a  revenue 
from  vice,  and  enrich  the  public 
treasury  by  the  debauchment  of  the 
citizens. 

History  shows  that  all  reforms 
have  come  not  from  the  so-called 
educated  classes,  but  from  the  com- 
mon people,  as  they  do  to-day, 
educated  in  the  practical  affairs  of 
life. 

OUR  HELPLESS   CONDITION. 

The  condition  of  the  country  is 
chaotic;  scarcely  a  ray  of  hope  ap- 
pears upon  the  horizon.  The  two 
old  parties  are  identical  in  the  en- 
actment of  laws  destructive  of  every 
public  good  to  the  country.  The 
Republicans  have  stood  more  sol- 
idly for  Cleveland  than  his  own 
party,  and  with  both  it  is  all  rot, 
riot  and  ruin.  The  country  would 
have  more  hope  for  reform  from 
the  harlots  of  the  land  than  from 
either  the  Republican  or  Demo- 
cratic party.  Read  the  history  of 
the  men  who  lead  them  and  the 
history  of  their  national  conven- 
tions. 

In  Minneapolis  the  G.  O.  P.  had 
their  headquarters  of  the  Repub- 
lican National  Committee  at  the 


37 


West  Hotel.  The  New  York  Voice, 
commenting  upon  it,  says:  "  They 
had  four  immense  bars  aggregating 
over  200  feet  in  length,  over  which 
thirty  bar-tenders  were  kept  busy 
passing  the  drinks,  and  eight  large 
cash  registers  were  required  to  re- 
cord the  receipts,  which  averaged 
$4,300  a  day/'  "A  number  of 
drunken  fights  occurred  in  the  bar- 
room among  the  delegates.  The 
houses  of  prostitution  imported 
hundreds  of  girls  from  other  cities 
for  the  occasion,  and  did  business 
in  the  most  shameful  and  obnox- 
ious manner.  The  reporter  counted 
fifty-five  men  that  entered  or  stood 
in  line  before  one  of  these  houses, 
and  forty-nine  of  them  wore  G.  O. 
P.  badges." 

The  Democratic  Convention  at 
Chicago  exactly  parallel  their  twin 
brothers  at  Minneapolis,  only  it 
was  not  made  so  conspicuous,  being 
spread  over  more  territory. 

This  is  the  kind  of  stuff  these 
men  are  made  of  who  head  the  re- 
form movements  in  the  old  parties, 
to  lead  the  country  up  to  a  higher 
standard  of  morals,  social  purity 
and  good  government,  and  they 
are  every  way  capable  of  doing  it 
-"like  hell." 

Any  man  who  can  believe  that 
relorm  will  come  from  such  a  rot- 
ten source  as  this  should  not  be 
allowed  to  be  at  large,  as  he  is  a 
menace  to  the  life,  liberties  and 


happiness  of  the  people.  Nothing 
is  more  certain,  not  even  death,  than 
that  he  is  feeble-minded  and  should 
be  taken  care  of. 

For  fear  that  some  may  still  have 
a  leaning  toward  the  old  parties,  I 
will  bring  upfanother  item  of  inter- 
est to  convince  them  that  both  par- 
ties are  totally  depraved  and  past 
redemption.  It  would  naturally  be 
supposed  upon  the  death  of  a  Pres- 
ident that  picked  men  would  be 
selected  by  Congress  to  attend  his 
funeral,  and  such  was  probably  the 
case.  Congress'approprialed  $40,- 
ooo  to  defray  the  expenses  of  Gar- 
field's  funeral,  and  appointed  a 
commissioner  to  superintend  it. 
The  bill  was  run  up  to  $73,000, 
which  was  allowed  and  paid,  only 
few  members  voting  against  it. 
Here  is  the  Congressional  record 
of  the  bill.  '  'Theylbought  and  con- 
sumed 32  gallons  and  233  cases 
of  wine,  in  all  lyoo  gallons;  30 
gallons  of  brandy ;  60  gallons  of 
whisky;  3  barrels  of  beer;  2  barrels 
of  ale;  5  cases  of  Apollinaris  water; 
3  cases  of  Congress;  2  cases  of  Old 
Tom  gin,  .and  5  gallons  of  rum; 
10,000  cigars;  2000  cigarettes;  17 
pounds  and  a  gross  of  papers  of 
tobacco."  This  for  drunkenness 
and  debauchery  breaks  all  previous 
records  in  the  history  of  wakes. 

Such  a  scene  of  drunken  revelry 
and  debauchery  enacted  over  the 
remains  of  a  professed  Christian 


-38- 


President  who  had  preached  the 
gospel,  by  a  professed  Christian 
nation,  would  make  the  blood  of  a 
savage  tingle  with  shame  at  the 
mention  of,  it  and  shows  how  dark 
infamy  broods  over  the  land.  It 
makes  no  difference  in  which  direc- 
tion we  steer,  we  bring  up  on  the 
same  old  rotten  snags,  and  people 
might  as  well  look  to  hell  for  reform 
as  to  look  to  this  hellish  brood. 

So  far  as  can  be  estimated,  we 
have  solved  no  problem  of  good 
government,  but  have  thoroughly 
convinced  the  world  that  we  are 
nothing  but  a  set  of  jackasses,  with 
great  braying  propensities.  The  Su- 
preme Court  of  the  nation  slapped 
the  working  classes  in  the  face 
when  the  organized  workers  en- 
deavored to  enjoin  an  illegal  issue 
of  bonds,  by  telling  them  they  had 
no  standing  in  the  Court.  They 
have  been  served  with  injunctions 
from  the  same  Court,  forbidding 
them  to  quit  work,  compelling 
them  to  work  at  reduced  wrages, 
and  enjoining  other  societies  from 
giving  them  aid. 

In  the  court  of  the  land  the 
poor  man  gets  no  justice  and  pays 
the  costs  of  court.  With  money, 
the  greatest  criminal  can  purchase 
his  liberty.  In  Buffalo,  the  switch- 
men struck  to  have  the  State  law 
enforced,  granting  them  ten  hours 
a  day's  work,  which  was  contemp- 
tuously disregarded  by  the  road, 


and  the  State  ordered  out  the  mil- 
itia, not  to  enforce  the  law,  but  to 
sustain  the  railroad  managers  in 
defiance  of  it. 

In  Oakland  the  Southern  Pacific 
Railroad  Company  have  had  notices 
posted  in  their  cars  for  years  that 
they  were  not  allowed  by  the  State 
to  charge  fares  within  the  corporate 
limits  of  the  city.  They  are  now 
charging  fares  in  defiance  of  the 
State  law,  and  when  they  inaugu- 
rated it,  put  armed  deputies  on 
each  platform  to  shoot  any  citizen 
down  like  a  dog  if  he  dared  insist 
they  obey  the  laws  of  the  State. 

The  Chinese  held  out  in  defiance 
of  our  laws  and  refused  to  register. 
When  declared  constitutional  by 
the  Supreme  Court,  Cleveland  be- 
came a  defier  of  our  laws,  and  gave 
protection  to  his  Chinese  brother 
in  doing  likewise,  and  violated  his 
oath  of  office. 

Wherever  we  look  it  is  only  to 
see  the  most  flagrant  violations  of 
law  on  every  hand,  from  the  chief 
executive  down. 

Governor  Altgeld,  of  Illinois,  re- 
lates an  incident  where  several 
laboring  men  were  congregated 
upon  a  vacant  lot  talking  in  a 
peaceful  manner,  when  they  were 
ordered  to  move  on  by  some  of  the 
police.  Some  of  the  men  protested, 
upon  which  the  policemen  drew 
their  revolvers  and  fired  upon  the 
men  who  were  going  off  and  killed 


—  39  — 


four  of  them,  some  one  hundred 
feet  distance  from  where  they  had 
stood.  Nothing  was  done  to  these 
policemen  who  committed  these  out- 
rageous murders.  He  also  speaks 
of  a  peaceful  meeting  of  working- 
men  congregated  in  a  hall,  being 
invaded  by  armed  police,  and  one 
of  their  number  killed,  and  then 
they  lined  themselves  down  the 
stairs  and  clubbed  them  as  they 
rushed  out. 

Homes  have  been  invaded  with- 
out search-warrants,  in  the  night, 
and  fathers  taken  from  their  fami- 
lies, clubbed  and  beaten  by  police- 
men, thrown  in  jail  for  three  or 
four  days,  and  allowed  no  hearing. 
These  acts  are  of  every- day  occur- 
rence in  our  land,  but  kept  silent 
through  the  subsidized  press.  The 
tyranny  and  inhuman  acts  of  des- 
potic Russia  can  be  duplicated  in 
our  own  land.  They  silence  free 
speech  in  our  large  cities,  and  allow 
no  workingmen  to  hold  public 
meetings  on  the  streets  to  talk  over 
their  grievances. 

No  race  constituted  like  the 
Americans  will  stand  it  much 
longer;  and  all  through  the  land 
an  uprising  is  on  foot  with  cyclonic 
power  to  sweep  these  tyrants,  op- 
pressors and  boodlers  into  a  mael- 
strom of  perdition,  and  establish  a 
government  for  the  people. 


THE  REMEDY. 

In  the  present  form  of  our  gov- 
ern ment,  we  have  either  made  some* 
terrible  mistake  in  setting  at  defi- 
ance the  laws  of  government,  or 
are  totally  incapable  of  good  gov- 
ernment. If  incapable,  then  we- 
are  hopelessly  lost;  if  through  some- 
mistake  we  have  set  at  defiance  the: 
laws  of  government,  then  there* 
still  remains  some  foundation  npons 
which  we  can  build  our  hopes. 

The  fatal  mistake  comes  through 
our  representative  system  of  gov- 
ernment. We  have  taken  it  for 
granted  that  worthy  men  could  be 
selected  from  our  midst  to  whom* 
we  could  delegate  our  sovereignty,, 
and  through  their  agency  secure 
just  and  equitable  laws.  Our  past 
history  demonstrates  to  us  how  sig- 
nally we  have  failed;  and  if  it  has. 
taught  us  one  lesson  more  impor- 
tant than  any  other,  it  is  this:  To 
keep  to  ourselves  individually  the- 
power  of  government,  and  never" 
yield  such  a  sacred  trust  to  others- 
In  such  an  act,  through  representa- 
tion, we  surrender  to  others  the- 
control  of  life,  liberty,  and  the  pur- 
suit of  happiness,  and  place  our- 
selves wholly  at  the  mercy  of  those? 
we  choose  to  represent  us. 

In  affairs  of  business  we  have  ex- 
ercised keen  foresight  and  intelli- 
gence ;  in  those  of  governnreiiit,. 
nothing  but  a  chaotic  mass  of 
absurdities  presents  itself. 


—  40  — 


In  bu  siness  life  there  is  no  dele- 
gation of  great  responsibilities  with- 
out bonds;  receipts  for  payments; 
titles  and  records  for  property;  for 
loans,  mortgages  and  securities. 

In  government,  how  different ! 
Kvery  sacred  right  of  family,  life 
and  property  is  completely  surren- 
dered to  others  upon  their  simple 
or  implied  promise  to  serve  us. 
They  are  under  no  other  than  moral 
restrictions;  and  we  have  given 
them  unlimited  power  either  to  ad- 
vance or  destroy  us  by  such  legis- 
lation as  they  choose  to  enact. 

History  has  taught  us  that,  with- 
out an  exception,  no  man,  church, 
society  or  party  can  be  trusted  with 
unlimited  power;  excessive  abuses 
always  attends  it.  Power  belongs 
to  the  governed,  and  not  to  those 
who  govern.  The  incorporation  of 
the  vicious  principle  that  those  who 
govern  receive  their  power  from 
the  governed  has  been  of  all  others 
the  one  fatal  step  that  has  precipi- 
tated the  nation  in  ruins.  No  rep- 
resentative principle  of  government 
can  be  equitable  or  just;  neither 
can  equity  or  justice  be  attained  by 
proportional  representation;  and  it 
matters  not  how  intelligent,  sincere 
or  honest  such  representatives  may 
be.  It  is  beyond  the  knowledge  of 
man  to  determine  just  what  princi- 
ples should  be  carried  out,  or  laws 
enacted,  to  give  a  just  proportion 
to  those  they  have  been  chosen  to 


represent.  Such  results  can  be 
obtained  by  the  direct  vote  of  the 
people  upon  all  laws.  The  princi- 
ple that  a  good  government  can  be 
obtained  through  the  representative 
system  is  false  in  every  particular, 
and  nothing  has  been  so  signally 
demonstrated  as  has  been  the  gro- 
tesque farce  of  government  made  by 
us.  To  further  continue  in  this, 
line  means  certain  destruction,  and 
is  inevitable  death. 

The  condition  of  the  country  is 
tenfold  more  degrading  now  than 
when  was  first  launched  this  Re- 
public. The  arm  of  the  law  has 
become  palsied ;  the  daily  press, 
hireling  puppets  of  the  money  pow- 
ers, breeders  of  licentiousness  and 
rot. 

All  of  these  elements  are  a  de- 
structive force  in  our  government, 
and  from  none  of  them  can  help 
come.  To  appeal  to  the  moral  or 
better  nature  of  the  nation  will 
meet  with  no  ready  response.  Only 
one  way  lies  open  to  us.  We  must 
appeal  to  the  selfishness  of  men  for 
self-preservation. 

Men  cannot  be  trusted  with  power 
while  all  would  like  to  possess  it. 
The  safety  of  society  depends  upon 
it  being  held  collectively,  and  not 
individually.  An  unequal  distri- 
bution of  it  immediately  creates 
disturbance,  and  begets  discordant 
relations.  When  men  find  that  as 
individuals  they  cannot  be  selected 


out  for  special  preferences,  rather 
than  be  destroyed  they  will  unite 
for  the  good  of  all. 

The  death  knell  to  our  represen- 
tative system  of  government  has 
been  rung;  we  stand  on  the  thresh- 
hold  of  a  new  era.  It  cannot  and 
will  not  be  continued  by  the  people 
of  this  government.  It  has  killed 
itself.  Select  from  society  your 
men  to  represent  you,  and  two  out 
of  every  three  will  sell  out.  It  is 
not  in  human  nature  to  do  better 
than  this.  If  such  a  statement  is 
correct  it  is  plain  to  see  that  to  go 
any  further  in  the  line  of  represen- 
tative government  is  extreme  folly; 
for  not  only  can  a  majority  be 
secured  against  us,  but  a  two- 
thirds  majority  when  required. 
The  money  and  corporate  powers 
are  more  powerful  to-day  than  in 
all  the  world's  history. 

It  is  beyond  the  power  of  human 
nature  to  resist  this  influence.  To 
further  delegate  sovereignty  to  rep- 
resentatives means  nothing  more 
than  to  be  sold  out  and  the  laws  of 
the  land  perverted  to  administer  to 
corporate  greed  and  money  power. 

The  remedy  lies  with  the  people, 
to  elect  to  office  the  People's  Party, 
to  repeal  all  laws  of  representative 
legislation,  and  enact  laws  giving 
to  the  people  their  rights  to  enact 
all  laws  of  the  land  by  direct  vote 
upon  them. 

By  this   one   stroke  the  bribery 


and  lobby  system  becomes  com- 
pletely annihilated.  Political  rings 
and  boss  rule  come  to  an  end. 
Professional  politicians,  ward  strik- 
ers and  heelers  throw  up  the  sponge, 
and  the  advent  of  "a  government 
of  the  people,  by  the  people  and  for 
the  people  "  will  be  begun.  Halls 
of  legislation,  being  shorn  of  their 
power  to  enact  laws,  having  noth- 
ing to  sell,  and  acting  in  the  ca- 
pacity of  stewards  only,  formulate 
laws,  and  submit  them  to  the 
people  to  be  enacted  or  rejected  by 
their  majority  vote.  This  is  called 
the  Referendum. 

That  every  citizen  or  citizens 
shall  have  a  right  to  propose  or 
petition  for  a  measure  of  law  to  his 
fellow  citizens  is  called  the  Initia- 
tive. 

The  Initiative  allows  a  minority 
of  voters  to  submit  a  measure  of 
law  to  the  people  at  any  election, 
to  be  accepted  or  rejected  by  a 
majority  vote. 

J.  W.  Sullivan,  in  a  book  written 
by  him,  entitled,  "Direct  Legisla- 
tion," recounts  in  the  following 
manner  the  wonderful  advance- 
ment made  by  Switzerland  through 
this  method  of  government : 

"  They  have  made  it  easy  at  any 
time  to  alter  their  cantonal  and 
federal  constitutions, — that  is,  to 
change,  even  radically,  the  organi- 
zation of  society,  the  social  contract, 
and  thus  to  permit  a  peaceful  revo- 


lution  at  the  will  of  the  majority. 
They  have,  as  well,  cleared  from 
the  way  pf  majority  rule  every 
obstacle,  privilege  of  ruler,  fet- 
ter of  ancient  law,  power  of  leg- 
islator. They  have  simplified  the 
structure  of  government,  held  their 
officials  as  servants,  rendered  bu- 
reaucracy impossible,  converted 
their  representatives  to  simple  com- 
mitteemen,  and  shown  the  parlia- 
mentary system  not  essential  to 
law-making.  They  have  written 
their  laws  in  language  so  plain  that 
a  layman  may  be  judge  in  the 
highest  court.  They  have  fore- 
stalled monopolies,  improved  and 
reduced  taxation,  avoided  incurring 
heavy  public  debts,  and  made  a 
better  distribution  of  their  land 
than  any  other  European  country. 
They  have  practically  given  home 
rule  in  local  affairs  to  every  com- 
munity. They  have  calmed  dis- 
turbing political  elements,  the  press 
is  purified,  the  politician  disarmed, 
the  civil  service  well  regulated. 
Hurtful  partisanship  is  passing 
away.  Since  the  people  as  a  whole 
will  never  willingly  surrender  their 
sovereignty,  reactionary  movement 
is  possible  only  in  case  the  nation 
should  go  backward.  But  the  way 
is  open  forward.  Social  ideals  may 
be  realized  in  act  and  constitution. 
Even  now  the  liberty- loving  Swiss 
citizen  can  discern  in  the  future  a 
freedom  in  which  every  individual, 


— independent,  possessed  of  rights 
in  nature's  resources  and  in  com- 
mand of  the  fruits  of  his  toil, — may, 
at  his  will,  on  the  sole  condition 
that  he  respect  the  like  aim  of 
other  men,  pursue  his  happiness." 

This  is  the  open  door  through 
which  we  are  not  only  to  regain  our 
lost  liberties,  but  which  opens  up 
the  way  to  the  highest  advancement 
in  the  art  of  government.  The  peo- 
ple, being  the  highest  tribunal  of 
the  land,  and  directly  interested, 
will  give  their  best  thought  and 
discussion  to  the  essential  princi- 
ples of  government,  and  number- 
ing sixty-five  millions,  will  evolve 
more  practical  government  in  one 
year  than  ever  could  be  generated 
in  the  narrow,  contracted  brains 
of  party  bigots  and  boodlers  for- 
ever. 

By  such  a  method  of  government 
the  people  will  be  swift  to  learn  the 
difference  between  good  and  bad 
laws,  and  the  sifting  will  begin. 
Those  that  experience  demonstrates 
to  be  good  will  become  crystallized 
with  our  institutions,  leading  up 
to  a  form  of  government  based  not 
upon  theory,  but  upon  acts  and 
experience. 

In  time  the  law-making  process 
will  cease,  and  we  shall  have  re- 
duced government  down  to  a  com- 
plete science.  With  this  one  great 
object  in  view,  all  reform  parties, 
such  as  the  Prohibition,  Socialist, 


-43 


Single  Tax,  and  others,  should 
combine  with  the  People's  Party, 
as  it  has  the  greatest  following, 
was  the  first  to  propose  direct  leg- 
islation, and  now  proposes  to  have 
no  other  than  this  one  plank  in 
its  platform.  Anything  further 
in  its  platform  than  the  plank 
advocating  direct  legislation  is  un- 
necessary, as  then  the  people,  and 
not  the  party,  will  enact  tljjeir  own 
laws.  The  people  will  go  a  step 
further,  and  annihilate  party  alto- 
gether, by  direct  nominations  to 
office  of  their  own  candidates. 

This  can  be  easily  accomplished 
by  having  an  election  for  the  nomi- 
nation of  candidates  by  direct  vote, 
and  the  three  who  receive  the 
highest  votes  being  put  up  as  can- 
didates for  election. 

This  gives  a  right  proportion  of 
candidates,  and,  when  elected,  they 
will  look  well  to  their  service  of 
the  people,  upon  whom  they  de- 
pend directly  for  their  re-election. 

And,  still  further,  the  Imperative 
Mandate  by  which  the  people  have 
the  power  to  depose  from  office  im- 
mediately an  unfaithful  officer,  and 
we  have  a  sample  government  of 
the  people  having  absolutely  under 
control  every  law,  appropriation 
and  official. 

With  this  object  attained,  all  re- 
form measures  can  be  submitted  to 
the  majority  of  voters  for  their  ac- 
ceptance or  rejection,  by  a  petition 


of  a  small  minority  of  voters.  A 
constitutional  law  that  grants  to  a 
minority  the  right  to  submit  a 
measure  of  law  to  the  people  to 
be  voted  upon  is  a  hundred- fold 
more  a  secure  safeguard  to  our  lib- 
erties than  any  representative  legis- 
lation that  can  exist  surrounded  by 
corrupt  influences. 

The  greatest  dangers  menace  our 
Republic  on  every  side,  and  if  the 
reform  elements  cannot  immediately 
combine  their  forces  upon  some 
specific  object  that  will  secure  to  us 
good  government,  nothing  will  be 
left  of  us  on  the  shores  of  time  but 
the  wreckage  of  our  once  great 
ship  of  state.  A  few  fundamental 
laws  enacted,  and  others  repealed, 
would  give  immediate  relief. 

The  charter  of  National  Banks 
could  be  repealed,  free  and  unlim- 
ited coinage  of  silver  restored,  our 
currency  increased  with  an  issue  of 
three  or  four  billions  of  green- 
backs, to  be  put  out  in  public  im- 
provements, and  loaned  to  the 
farmer,  mechanic,  workmen,  or 
others,  on  good  security,  at  one  per 
cent,  per  annum,  amounts  of  loans 
not  to  exceed  five  thousand  dollars 
each. 

We  would  destroy  alien  owner- 
ship of  land,  and  enact  a  law  that 
those  who  had  an  excess  of  one 
hundred  and  sixty  acres  of  land 
would  be  compelled  to  put  such 
land  upon  the  market  for  sale,  at  a 


—  44  — 


stipulated  price,  and  the  price  they 
would  sell  for  would  be  the  price 
they  would  be  taxed. 

We  would  have  a  graded  income 
tax,  and  nationalize  lands,  rail- 
roads, telegraph  and  telephone 
lines,  all  labor-saving  machines 
and  natural  monopolies,  and  be- 
come a  distinct,  corporate  govern- 
ment, having  none  of  the  dog-eat- 
dog  competitive  system,  and  swear- 
ing eternal  death  to  vermin  and 
parasite  classes. 

The  God-given  title  to  life,  "that 
man  must  earn  his  bread  by  the 
sweat  of  his  brow,"  and  not  from 
the  sweat  of  another's  brow,  will 
be  our  motto  and  title  to  citizen- 
ship. Woman  will  have  the  ballot, 
and  through  her  purifying  influ- 
ence and  efforts  we  will  drive  the 
saloon,  brothel,  gambling  hell,  and 
other  corrupting  influences  from 
our  midst,  and  give  to  the  children 
she  rears  a  government  that  will 
continue,  and  increase  those  purify- 
ing influences  that  have  blessed 
them  within  her  home.  All  party 
strife  and  religious  bigotry  must 
cease.  No  A.  P.  A.  firebrand, 
hurled  by  the  Shylocks  and  vermin 
classes,  to  break  up  our  ranks  by 
religious  strife  and  hatred,  shall  be 
allowed  to  sever  the  cord  of  our 
brotherhood  of  men. 

Government  as  now  instituted 
means  not  the  protection,  but 
hatred  and  debauchment  of  its  citi- 


zens. It  does  not  place  as  much 
value  on  their  lives  as  it  does  on 
that  of  a  rat.  The  very  dogs  in 
our  midst  are  better  cared  for  and 
protected  by  them  than  are  the 
lives  of  human  beings.  This  thing 
is  rank  and  smells  to  heaven,  and 
the  just  retribution  of  a  righteous 
God  is  at  hand. 

CONCLUSION. 

Millions  of  the  nation's  best  citi- 
zens have  been  brought  to  the 
brink  of  starvation  by  Judas  legis- 
lators, refusing  to  give  them  a  cur- 
rency to  exchange  the  products  of 
their  labors.  Without  this  cur- 
rency, the  fields  produce  in  vain, 
and  labor  meets  with  no  reward. 
The  proportion  of  goods  necessary 
for  each  individual,  and  the  time 
when  required,  are  of  such  com- 
plicated nature  that  some  medium 
of  exchange  must  go  between  them 
to  adjust  their  relations.  Our 
Government  has  flatly  refused  to 
give  to  its  people  their  currency, 
and  it  now  remains  with  the  people 
to  furnish  some  substitute  for  it,  or 
perish. 

Scrip  has  been  issued  by  States 
and  counties,  and  has  answered  the 
place  of  money  ;  as  it  interfered 
with  the  banker's  profits,  he  has 
influenced  the  general  government 
to  forbid  its  use. 

One  way  lies  open,  and  it  will 
be  beyond  the  power  of  Govern- 
ment to  interfere : 


—  45  — 


In  any  State,  county  or  city 
where  the  People's  Party  have 
elected  their  candidates  they  can 
immediately  go  forward  with  pub- 
lic improvements,  if  the  people  so 
desire,  and  pay  for  such  improve- 
ments by  orders  issued  in  fractions 
upon  the  public  treasury,  or  by  the 
issue  of  bonds,  payable  in  twenty- 
five  years,  at  one-eighth  of  one  per 
cent,  per  annum. 

These  orders  should  not  be  pre- 
sented for  payment,  but  be  kept  in 
circulation,  and  made  to  serve  the 
place  of  money  in  the  exchange 
and  in  the  payment  of  debt.  All 
classes  would  be  willing  to  receive 
them  in  payment,  and  pass  them 
along  as  the  State,  county  or  city 


would  be  ample  security  for  them. 

They  would  be  received  for 
taxes,  and,  to  prevent  speculation 
in  them,  cashed  by  the  treasurer  at 
a  small  discount. 

By  this  method  we  could  revive 
every  industry  of  the  State,  and, 
instead  of  the  starvation  that  now 
exists,  have  abundance  through 
this  medium  of  exchange  of  the 
productive  energies,  that  are  now 
going  to  waste. 

This  plan  can  be  successfully 
carried  out,  and  if  presented  to  the 
voters  of  the  State  will  bring 
thousands  of  supporters  within  the 
ranks  of  the  People's  Party  at  the 
coming  election. 


